https://www.popsci.com/drones-plant-trees
Climate change is a sprawling, complex problem. But there is an astonishingly simple way to make a difference: plant more trees. Trees scrub pollution from the air, reduce erosion, improve water quality, provide homes for animals and insects, and enhance our lives in countless other ways.
It turns out that ecosystem restoration is also an emerging business opportunity. A new report from the World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy says governments around the world have committed to reviving nearly 400 million acres of wilderness — an area larger than South Africa. As countries push to regrow forests, startups are dreaming up new, faster ways to plant trees. For some innovators, like NASA veteran Dr. Lauren Fletcher, that means using drones.
Fletcher said his conversion from stargazer to eco-warrior was driven by his worry about climate change, which has been dramatically worsened by deforestation. To tackle the problem, he created BioCarbon Engineering, which he describes as an ecosystem restoration company. Working with colleagues, he came up with a 30-pound unmanned aerial vehicle nicknamed “Robin.” It can fly over the most rugged landscapes on earth, planting trees in precise locations at the rate of 120 per minute.
Originally published on Nexus Media. By Josh Landis and Owen Agnew, 3 Feb 2018 on Clean Technica
Climate change is a sprawling, complex problem. But there is an astonishingly simple way to make a difference: plant more trees. Trees scrub pollution from the air, reduce erosion, improve water quality, provide homes for animals and insects, and enhance our lives in countless other ways.
It turns out that ecosystem restoration is also an emerging business opportunity. A new report from the World Resources Institute and the Nature Conservancy says governments around the world have committed to reviving nearly 400 million acres of wilderness — an area larger than South Africa. As countries push to regrow forests, startups are dreaming up new, faster ways to plant trees. For some innovators, like NASA veteran Dr. Lauren Fletcher, that means using drones.
Fletcher said his conversion from stargazer to eco-warrior was driven by his worry about climate change, which has been dramatically worsened by deforestation. To tackle the problem, he created BioCarbon Engineering, which he describes as an ecosystem restoration company. Working with colleagues, he came up with a 30-pound unmanned aerial vehicle nicknamed “Robin.” It can fly over the most rugged landscapes on earth, planting trees in precise locations at the rate of 120 per minute.
Fletcher came up with his response to the problem of deforestation by identifying a major obstacle to planting 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,” Fletcher said. “[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, grueling work.”
Fletcher thought he could do better, so he put together a team of 12 experts with backgrounds in engineering, community development, ecology, biology and remote sensing. Step one was finding the right species of tree. “This is about restoration of local ecosystems, full stop. If you don’t get the biology side right, then you’re not a solution,” Fletcher said. Step two was building tree-planting robots.
BioCarbon Engineering’s fleet of drones flies ten feet off the ground, gently firing seed pods into the earth at the rate of two per second. That’s fast, but what’s most promising is the potential to scale. Fletcher says his goal is to plant 500 billion trees by 2050.
To meet that goal, he will need more than just drones. “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,” said Fletcher, who wants to use planes and ground-based machines for planting in addition to drones.
BioCarbon Engineering isn’t the only entrant into this field. Firms like DroneSeed in Seattle, Washington are developing plans to use drones to plant seeds, and already uses UAVs to spread fertilizer and spray herbicide. And UK startup Aerial Forestation is doing the same thing, but instead of deploying drones, they are relying on military transport aircrafts. These and other firms are responding to a growing global push for reforestation outlined by the new report.
The many benefits of trees. Source: World Resources Institute
Fletcher is optimistic about the future of forests. “This isn’t just a convergence of technology,” he said. “It’s actually a convergence of social will and political power that are all focused on this global problem.”
tree-planting drone armies could plant as many as 100,000 trees every day, even in remote locations that aren’t easily accessible.
Some 15 billion trees are cut down every year, the The World Economic Forum explains with only 9 billion being planted. That’s a deficit of 6 billion trees a year, as hand planting is slow and expensive.
BioCarbon Engineering, a British company, backed up by well-known drone manufacturer Parrot has devised technology that would allow drone to map out an area to plan an efficient planting pattern. Think of it as a Roomba robot mapping your house before vacuuming it. Only instead of a robot on wheels walking your floors, you have a flying drone looking at the earth beneath it to determine an efficient tree-planting pattern.
Then, a second drone is loaded with germinated seedpods which can be dropped at a rate of 1 per second, for a maximum of 100,000 units a day. 60 drones could plant 1 billion trees every year. A drone has a maximum capacity of 300 seedpods and covers a hectare in about 19 minutes.
The engineers estimate the method is 10 times faster and 20% cheaper than hand planting, and the technology was already tested in various locations, including the historic mining sites in Dungog Australia.
The Forum explains that a similar idea is developed by Oregon startup DroneSeed, which is developing “precision forestry” techniques that involve the use of drones for planting trees and spraying them with fertilizer and herbicides.
The system’s designers say their technique is much more efficient and accurate than regular aerial seeding methods. Initial testing in the U.K. found that the species planted by drone had a better survival rate than helicopter spreading that’s more commonly used. Some species even had survival rates nearly identical to hand planting.
“We are bridging this gap between ground-based technologies like tractors and aerial technologies such as helicopters,” Fedorenko says.
Speed is the most revolutionary aspect of BCE’s “precision planting” technology, but the drones can also reach places that tractors and humans cannot, at least without significant bodily risk—for example, steep mountainsides or areas with contaminated soil. Drones may even one day help terraform other planets.
But it’s not just about trees: “We have a title of tree-planting drone company, but we also do grasses, bushes, flowers, and a lot of fungi,” Fedorenko says. “It’s about restoring what is right for the environment, not just trees.”
Pioneer plant species are usually the most successful, “but the general rule is that if you can restore the forest from seeds, then you can use drones to do that,” Fedorenko says.
In June, BioCarbon planted 5,000 trees in a day to rehabilitate land ravaged by coal mining in Dungog, Australia. They’ve also worked in South Africa and New Zealand. Since the company’s inception, they’ve used drones to plant more than 25,000 trees across the globe.
“If you re-forest a large area of land, you bring back not just fertile soil, but you can really impact local climate, improve the water table, carbon sequestration, increase biodiversity, and, of course, landscapes are never empty so you always have people who are benefiting from the ecosystem,” Fedorenko says.
THE BIG PICTURE
Experts caution that planting itself is not always as important as protection from factors such as overgrazing, agriculture, and fires, to allow natural regeneration of forests to occur. Some experts worry that the efficiency of drone reforestation could even lower motivation for countries to save existing forests. Additionally, in traditional reforestation enterprises, the planting work can provide employment for communities that need it—jobs that could one day be replaced by drones.
“It’s probably easier, in the short term, to plant trees with a drone than fix the issues on the ground, but in the long run, that fix is necessary,” says Richard Houghton, a senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center, a climate change think tank based in Massachusetts. “A technical fix is generally easier than social change, but not as long lasting.”
With constantly improving GPS and imaging technologies, experts agree that drones have become very useful for accurately mapping large swaths of land and measuring tree and vegetation growth or degradation—even mapping carbon sequestration. But some scientists are more skeptical about their success as a planting technology to combat deforestation on a large scale. For one thing, they only have so much range and battery life.
“Drones are good for measuring secondary growth and looking at where the forest is coming back, but you fight deforestation at a socioeconomic level,” says Arturo Sanchez, director of the University of Alberta’s Center for Earth Observation and Sciences. “The issue of climate change is not forest restoration, the issue is energy. It is controlling coal plants, power plants, automobile emissions. Planting trees is very important, but when you look at the distribution of CO2 emissions, deforestation accounts for 10 to 15 percent. The rest is energy. That’s what needs to be controlled.”
Fedorenko acknowledges that drones alone cannot eliminate all the causes or impacts of deforestation, but she says they could become a useful tool. (See how drones set controlled burns by shooting fireballs.)
FIELD TESTS
BCE just started work on a large-scale project to plant mangroves in Myanmar, incorporating this integrated approach to ecosystem restoration. Mangroves in Myanmar’s low-lying Ayeyarwady Delta have been decimated by years of deforestation for agriculture and aquaculture—eighty-four percent of the original mangrove cover is gone.
“Mangroves have huge potential to actually save people’s lives because they protect coastal communities from tsunamis,” Fedorenko says. “Not only do they have an impact on the ecosystem, like fish stocks, so that people can maintain their livelihoods, but they are also a literal shield from the ocean.”
Their tangled roots also protect coastal areas from erosion.
The project spans more than 600 acres and involves a “holistic” approach to measuring success: BCE will be partnering with an NGO to work with local women farmers, training and employing them to collect and prepare the seeds, as well as monitor the ecosystem as the project progresses. BCE will be able to assess whether the mangroves are growing successfully in less than a year.
Mangrove forests are also some of the most carbon-rich habitats on the planet, sequestering carbon up to 100 times faster than terrestrial forests. That means they’re incredibly efficient at mitigating the impact of global warming.
The project is one step closer to BCE’s main goal: “Of course, our ultimate ambition is to stop climate change,” Fedorenko says with a smile.
