Tree-Planting Drones – A Booming Business to Restore and Revive Earth
In the last couple of decades, ‘environmental conservation’ has been the subject of various global conferences and world summits.
Our steady and ever-increasing world population is partly responsible for large scale environmental degradation, deforestation and pollution in our environment.
Despite this, there is one major means of rectifying our planets large-scale environmental degradation; and that is by “going green” and embarking on massive afforestation and reforestation.
Science, biology and nature has proven to us the benefits of trees and forests; which include naturally recycling air, reduction of erosion, providing homes for insects and animals, improving the quality of water, and impacting positively in our lives in more ways than one.
In a bid to salvage and restore our environment from adverse climate change due to environmental degradation, a new business venture is set to gradually blossom – tree planting.
According to latest environmental conservation reports from World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy, there is a global push by governments around the globe to revive and restore about 400 million acres of waste land.
Such a massive area and scale of restoration can be compared to an area of land surpassing the size of South Africa. A target procedure for this environmental restoration would mean devising a faster means of tree-planting, and Dr. Lauren Fletcher, a NASA veteran and an innovator believes using “drones” would be essential.
Tree-planting drones
To speed up the salvation of our ecosystem, Dr. Fletcher has created an ecosystem restoration company, known as 'BioCarbon Engineering'. With his colleagues, Fletcher, has come up with a 30 pound unmanned aerial vehicle known as “Robin”
Source: Tree-Planting Drone
This unique piece of tech can navigate over rugged terrains and plant trees in precise locations at the stunning rate of 120 trees per minute.
To cope with the problem of deforestation, Dr. Lauren Fletcher identified a major challenge to developing new ecosystems;
“I understood why forests were coming down so fast, but I was really puzzled as to why it was so hard to put them back together. I realized very quickly that it’s because the state of the art [method] at the time was really hand planters, people with a bag of saplings on their shoulder going out, day after day, and bending over every 15 to 20 seconds and planting a tree, and it’s really hard, gruelling work.”
Concept of the Tree-planting drones
Fletcher assembled 12 experts in fields of biology, ecology, remote sensing, engineering and community development, to;
Source: Remote Sensing
- find the right specie of tree
- design tree-planting robots
“This is about restoration of local ecosystems, full stop. If you don’t get the biology side right, then you’re not a solution. Our solution is not a wholesale replacement of hand planting. There are times where hand planting is absolutely the right solution and sometimes the only solution.”
By 2050, Fletcher hopes to have planted 500 billion trees. His BioCarbon Engineering drones fly 10 feet above the ground and fire seed pods at the rate of 2 per second, into the soil. But he believes hand-planting, use of planes and ground-based machines would all be needed in addition to the drones to meet the target.
Other “Tree-planting” Collaborators
BioCarbon Engineering is not alone in the growing global push to reforest out environment. Other firms are advancing methods to aid environmental conservation.
Source: DroneSeed UAV tech
For instance, a Washington-based DroneSeed already dissipate fertilizer and herbicides using UAVs.
They also plan to use drones to plant seeds.
In the UK, Aerial Forestation has followed suit using military transport carriers, instead of drones.
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This is good news, we just have to hope that it's not too little too late. It always shocked me in school geography class when we were told about deforestation and the rate that always seemed to be increasing each year.
Perfect view. Thanks rickie
Nice post
Drones planting Forest back how can you not like that tec.