Former NASA Engineer To Plant 1B Trees/Year with Drones

[KroLazuxy_87]

Former NASA Engineer Plans To Plant 1 Billion Trees A Year Using Drones

May 1, 2015 | by Caroline Reid

Industrial deforestation is responsible for the destruction of forests worldwide and results in disruptive effects on their ecosystems, including reduced biodiversity, increased soil erosion and the release of greenhouse gas emissions, to name a few.

Planting a tree takes a lot longer than cutting one down, and it's a relatively slow and expensive process. Fortunately, a solution may be on the horizon.

BioCarbon Engineering, the brainchild of former NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher, has proposed a solution: Industrial reforestation with robot drones. Could reforestation get any more awesome?

The drones would plant an estimated 1 billion trees a year, saving people from having to do it by hand. This would make reforestation quicker and cheaper. However, Fletcher doesn’t say that this new method of reforestation is necessarily better than planting trees by hand, just cheaper. If put into full effect, the drone method of planting trees could cut the price of traditional practices down to 15% of the original cost.

The drones won’t indiscriminately fire seeds anywhere they happen to fly over. Instead, the machines will first gather terrain data and information on the local fauna, reporting back on the region's “restoration potential.”

When the restoration potential is approved, and the region is ready to support new seeds, a planting route is mapped for the drones to follow. The drones then fire the ground with germinated seed pellets at a rate of 10 seeds per minute.

The drones’ jobs aren’t done once the seeds are planted. They will also perform plant audits to monitor the ecosystem over time. This is important to assess how effective the drones were and what improvements can be made in the future.

The entire process is called "precision planting." In order for it to have the greatest benefit on the ecosystem, the team plans to work alongside local reforestation organizations to best match the biodiversity requirements of each individual region.

Drone-powered reforestation is a good solution to deforestation; however, it's treating the symptoms, not the problem. Deforestation wreaks havoc on ecosystems, and while it’s great to have a method that quickly and cheaply replants trees, it may be better to reduce large-scale deforestation first.

Deforestation may indeed be better, but I think it'll be easier to get drones to plant trees than to get people to stop cutting them down.

[Irbis]

Ok, and to play devil's advocate - where they intend to plant these trees?

Deforestation is a problem because humans clear land for farms and pastures, it's not like you can just replant there. If you mean replanting on abandoned land, trees do that quite nicely on their own, unless the whole area was totally devastated for some reason.

Plus, it might cut to 15% of the planting cost, but how many seeds are you going to lose? I don't see this being as viable as carefully seeding by hand, and if you waste enough savings will be illusory.

[madd0ct0r]

seeds are damn cheap. it's the transport and labour of planting. If they have to be walked in, a person can only walk so far per day, even if they are just dropping seeds behind them.

[Lagmonster]

The best part of this is the cost reduction, really. I don't believe that we're actually doing that bad of a job in North America of planting as many trees as we can without disturbing agriculture or urban centres.

[Irbis]

seeds are damn cheap

Seeds might be cheap but they need right conditions to start growing. Right depth, water access, etc. I'd be very surprised if even one in a thousand dropped from plane turned out to be viable, and not say quickly eaten by anything passing by.

Frankly, the only use for this I can see is industrial forests with monoculture trees, which would find sacking workers and buying equipment and seeds you can write into tax deductible operating costs useful. Such enterprise wouldn't care about waste or non-optimal growth, all that would matter would be cost cutting.

[Borgholio]

seeds are damn cheap

Seeds might be cheap but they need right conditions to start growing. Right depth, water access, etc. I'd be very surprised if even one in a thousand dropped from plane turned out to be viable, and not say quickly eaten by anything passing by.

Frankly, the only use for this I can see is industrial forests with monoculture trees, which would find sacking workers and buying equipment and seeds you can write into tax deductible operating costs useful. Such enterprise wouldn't care about waste or non-optimal growth, all that would matter would be cost cutting.

Yeah planting seeds by hand has to deal with the same aspects of depth and water access. That's partly what I took from the article, that the drones would look for the best places. So they wouldn't just dump a bunch of seeds on a bare patch of dirt, they would drop them into piles of leaf litter or in a moist patch of ground near a stream, or something like that. Plus there's nothing saying that they can't mix drones carrying varying types of seeds so they avoid the monoculture problem.

[KroLazuxy_87]

seeds are damn cheap

Seeds might be cheap but they need right conditions to start growing. Right depth, water access, etc. I'd be very surprised if even one in a thousand dropped from plane turned out to be viable, and not say quickly eaten by anything passing by.

Frankly, the only use for this I can see is industrial forests with monoculture trees, which would find sacking workers and buying equipment and seeds you can write into tax deductible operating costs useful. Such enterprise wouldn't care about waste or non-optimal growth, all that would matter would be cost cutting.

They've actually addressed this on their facebook page, they say that the seeds will definitely not be just of one type, but a mixture of types that's appropriate for wherever it is they're planting. They plan to first survey the area they intend to plant the trees then load the drone(s) with a mixture of seeds, each contained within a "seed packet" that will be dropped/fired at a rate of 1 seed every 6 seconds. The drone(s) will monitor the growth afterwards and presumably perform replantings if a certain species they originally seeded isn't taking hold. They haven't gone into specifics about what makes up a "seed packet" but I imagine it's specific to each seed and also serves to protect the seed from the elements while providing a prime germination environment. Also, there's an assumption that all seeds are vulnerable to being eaten when in fact many of them rely on it. See: Fruit.

Ok, and to play devil's advocate - where they intend to plant these trees?

Deforestation is a problem because humans clear land for farms and pastures, it's not like you can just replant there. If you mean replanting on abandoned land, trees do that quite nicely on their own, unless the whole area was totally devastated for some reason.

Plus, it might cut to 15% of the planting cost, but how many seeds are you going to lose? I don't see this being as viable as carefully seeding by hand, and if you waste enough savings will be illusory.

They have not addressed what areas specifically as far as I can tell, but I think that's simply because they intend to have this being done anywhere trees/plants can or should be planted. As for the assertion that trees are replanting themselves quite nicely, I disagree. Given enough time, of course a cleared field will be overgrown. The issue is just how much time, and what species will move in? If huge, towering trees that seed slowly have been removed, the field may be replaced later by smaller, faster growing trees that would keep the larger trees from recolonizing the area. This would result in a net-loss of habitat, CO2 sequestration, and biomass. By tailoring the seeding process to the original ecosystem in various ways, regrowth can occur faster and resemble the original more closely.

The best part of this is the cost reduction, really. I don't believe that we're actually doing that bad of a job in North America of planting as many trees as we can without disturbing agriculture or urban centres.

I'm not sure I can express how much I agree that reduction in cost of replanting is important. Even if they're overestimating the cost savings, even a reduction to 50% of the cost would be huge. Donations to tree planting projects like this one would go a lot further - an important improvement when considering how underfunded many of these projects are.

Even the token corporate donations thrown out to calm the hungry environmentalists would go further. I just hope that they don't cut back on those donations because less money will get them the same number of trees planted...

[FTeik]

Reading the headline I thought the drones would plant seedlings, not just dump seeds into the ground.

[Simon_Jester]

Also, reading the headline I thought this was already happening. That's what it means if, say, you say "Obama to Outlaw Fun." That would literally mean Obama is going to outlaw fun, not that Obama has aired a proposal to maybe outlaw fun at some later date if nobody minds.

So can we get a change of the title to reflect that this is a proposal? The fact that someone is proposing it, not already certain to do it, is far more important than the fact that the proposal comes from a former NASA engineer.

[KroLazuxy_87]

Also, reading the headline I thought this was already happening. That's what it means if, say, you say "Obama to Outlaw Fun." That would literally mean Obama is going to outlaw fun, not that Obama has aired a proposal to maybe outlaw fun at some later date if nobody minds.

So can we get a change of the title to reflect that this is a proposal? The fact that someone is proposing it, not already certain to do it, is far more important than the fact that the proposal comes from a former NASA engineer.

This isn't some proposal they're shopping around to draw investors. They've got the engineers, they've got the system, they're going to do it.




Here's a video that'll answer some questions people may have.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NRNY1-8GGU

[Simon_Jester]

The article text you actually quoted did not say that the proposal would happen, only that it had been proposed.

[mr friendly guy]

Well I hear China is continuing to plant their Green Wall in the desert, maybe he could convince the Chinese to try this drone idea in a small area and see how it works out.

[Eleas]

Typically, when replanting baby trees in the garden, you want a hole twice (or was it three times?) the width of the roots system of the tree. That's a lot of work for a lonely drone, although I suppose requirements may be more lax in nature.

[Eleas]

(Never mind, it's seed pellets and I just can't read.)