How to Plant A Billion Trees in 12 Months Using Drones
The disappearance of the world’s forests is a pressing ecological issue, and one team of engineers in Oxford, England, have come up with an ingenious strategy to tackle the problem: tree planting drones.
Lauren Fletcher spent 20 years as an engineer with NASA, so when he decided that he wanted to do something about deforestation, he thought about the problem from a technological perspective. Billions of trees are destroyed every year by logging and clear felling, so Fletcher concluded that the only way to counteract industrial scale forest destruction was with some sort of industrial scale forest planting scheme.
Fletcher assembled a small team of collaborators in Oxford. The ambitious mission of Fletcher’s new start-up was to devise a cost effective drone based system capable of planting a billion trees every year. Biocarbon Engineering was born.
Fletcher and his team designed an ingenious air gun that mounts under the chassis of a drone and fires seeds into the ground as the drone flies. Each seed is contained in a biodegradable shell casing which decomposes when it is exposed to moisture, allowing the seed inside to germinate and grow.
Biocarbon Engineering collaborated with industrial drone maker VulcanUAV to build their customised drone system, using existing off-the-shelf technology to minimise the unit cost of production and streamline scalability.
Biocarbon Engineering’s drone system works like this; first, a fixed wing drone is sent to fly over the deforested area and survey it, creating a detailed 3-dimensional map of the landscape. Once the aerial survey data is downloaded, software creates a seeding plan, which is optimised according to the topography.
The second phase of the process is executed using a rotor driven drone that carries the specially designed seed gun. As it flies along the seeding route, the drone automatically fires the seed bullets into the ground from a height of a few meters.
Each seed bullet contains a concentrated fertilizer mix to promote the healthy growth of the seedling.
Biocarbon Engineering adapt their system for different ecologies using locally sourced seeds, to best replicate the indigenous forest environment.
Once the seeds are sown, the survey drone is redeployed on a regular basis to monitor the growth of the seedling forest and all the data collected by the drone surveys is analyzed to optimise the planting system.
Biocarbon Engineering’s drones can plant as many as 35,000 seeds in a day and can be operated in landscapes that are difficult for human tree planters to get at.
In addition to tree seeds, the seed-gun shells can be loaded with fungi and microorganisms to help rehabilitate degraded soil and give the new forest the best chance of flourishing.
The Biocarbon project got a major boost recently when they made a deal for US$2.5 million in development investment from SYSTEMIQ, a purpose-driven investment and advisory firm that aims to tackle economic system failures, and Parrot, a leading European drone group.
Fletcher and the Biocarbon Engineering team are now collaborating with ecologists in Southeast Asia, Africa, and Australia, and they plan to scale up their operation to 100 drone equipped teams operating independently around the world by 2020.
Watch this inspiring video about Biocarbon Engineering’s high-tech ecological mission:
This article was first published on the Linx-Global blog.
