Planting Drones.

[George Gorman]

These drones can plant 100,000 trees a day

 

Deforestation remains a huge problem, but drones could help solve that.

 

Image: REUTERS/Feisal Omar

 

29 Jun 2017

 

Charlotte EdmondFormative Content

 

It’s simple maths. We are chopping down about*15 billion*trees a year and planting about 9 billion. So there’s a net loss of 6 billion trees a year.

 

Hand planting trees is slow and expensive. To keep pace with the tractors and bulldozers clearing vast areas of land, we need an industrial-scale solution.

 

For example, a drone that can plant up to 100,000 trees a day.

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BioCarbon Engineering, a UK-based company backed by drone manufacturer Parrot, has come up with a method of planting trees quickly and cheaply. Not only that, trees can also be planted in areas that are difficult to access or otherwise unviable.

 

Planting by drone

 

First a drone scans the topography to create a 3D map. Then the most efficient planting pattern for that area is calculated using algorithms.

 

A drone loaded with germinated seeds fires pods into the ground at a rate of*one per second, or about 100,000 a day. Scale this up and 60 drone teams could plant 1 billion trees a year.

 

Have you read?Deforestation is one of the greatest challenges facing humanity - here’s one way to stop itSave the forests? There's now a deforestation-tracking app for thatWe need to save Africa’s forests. Here’s how

 

The system’s engineers estimate that their method is about 10 times faster and only 20% of the cost of hand planting. And because there is no heavy machinery involved, it’s possible to plant in hard-to-reach areas that have no roads or steep, inaccessible terrain.The BioCarbon team has tested its technology in various locations and recently trialled reseeding historic mining sites in Dungog, Australia.

 

Elsewhere, a similar idea is being used by Oregon start-up DroneSeed, which is attempting to create a new era of “precision forestry” with the use of drones to plant trees as well as spray fertilizer and herbicides.

 

Agriculture is one of the biggest drivers for deforestation, with vast swathes of forest cleared to make way for the cultivation of crops including soy, palm oil and cocoa, as well as for beef farming.

 

At the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting in Davos this year, Norway announced a*$400 million fund*to kick-start investments in deforestation-free agriculture in countries that are working to reduce their forest and peat degradation.

 

It is estimated that the world loses between74,000 and 95,000*square miles of forest a year – that’s an area the size of 48 football fields lost every minute.

 

 

 

George Gorman (Greenscope Landscapes)

[Billhook]

Drone technology has somewhat passed me by and it is great to hear of these initiatives. It seems to be a win win situation.

 

We had an archaeologist here looking at a site of interest and he brought his very expensive drone which took off and began to photo map a field in a predetermined search pattern all by itself and then land itself at the foot of the archaeologist. Cost a few thousand I believe.

 

Not wishing to be left out of this Brave New World I bought a drone off Amazon for £67.99

 

[ame]https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01M629244/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1[/ame]

 

I was very impressed with the technology at such a low price. read the instructions and did a flight test in a sheltered spot, all very simple and easy.

Thought I would have a go at photographing my house with my wife slaving in the herb garden and took about a dozen very high quality pictures before thinking that I ought to land it before over confidence crept in

 

Pushed the throttle lever down to land and it went higher and off to the South. I pushed all the emergency buttons and it was totally unresponsive to any input. Also the camera was not working. Ran out into the neighbours garden to see it disappearing towards the South until it became a small speck.

 

Fruitless searches in the nearby park were not helped by the appearance of a very large bull with heifers in tow!

 

But I did enjoy my ten minutes of glory for £68!

[sandspider]

Same thing happened to a drone my brother in law got, vanished to the North and was never seen again!

 

Wonder how well drone planted trees fair, without shelters, mulches, weeding (apart from (inaccurate?) weedkiller sprayed by drones perhaps) etc.

[Gary Prentice]

Drone technology has somewhat passed me by and it is great to hear of these initiatives. It seems to be a win win situation.

 

We had an archaeologist here looking at a site of interest and he brought his very expensive drone which took off and began to photo map a field in a predetermined search pattern all by itself and then land itself at the foot of the archaeologist. Cost a few thousand I believe.

 

Not wishing to be left out of this Brave New World I bought a drone off Amazon for £67.99

 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01M629244/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

 

I was very impressed with the technology at such a low price. read the instructions and did a flight test in a sheltered spot, all very simple and easy.

Thought I would have a go at photographing my house with my wife slaving in the herb garden and took about a dozen very high quality pictures before thinking that I ought to land it before over confidence crept in

 

Pushed the throttle lever down to land and it went higher and off to the South. I pushed all the emergency buttons and it was totally unresponsive to any input. Also the camera was not working. Ran out into the neighbours garden to see it disappearing towards the South until it became a small speck.

 

Fruitless searches in the nearby park were not helped by the appearance of a very large bull with heifers in tow!

 

But I did enjoy my ten minutes of glory for £68!

 

Personally I'd keep quiet and deny all knowledge of a lost drone. Gatwick shut twice on Sunday due to rogue drones, one might have been yours!

[Steve Bullman]

I wonder how big these drones are exactly, and how many seed pods they carry at a time.

[Daniël Bos]

I'm pretty sure these don't actually plant any trees.

They shoot seeds, (coated so they're off a uniform size plus the coating can be made of fertiliser/fungicide/herbicide etc) with compressed air, like a flying pea shooter.

[markieg31]

Sound good to me if it works. We really need to plant something for the forestry workers of the future.

 

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[Spruce Pirate]

Sound good to me if it works. We really need to plant something for the forestry workers of the future.

 

There won't be any forestry workers, just drone operators.

[markieg31]

Ha ha. Harvesting drones. Wouldn't matter how steep the terrain then

 

Sent from my SM-G900F using Arbtalk mobile app

[Beardie]

I call BS on this one. Firing a pellet of seed into the ground is not the same as planting a tree. It's a fancy technofix which fails to address many of the issues which cause deforestation, and anyway the firing mechanism would need to be pretty powerful to penetrate the iron-hard soil of subtropical Africa. Testing it on mining heaps in Australia is not quite the same.

There is also the possibility of the scheme being dominated by commercially-important species at the expense of native trees of local provenance.