As a whole, humanity has become very efficient at cutting down trees and automating many of the industries that play a role in deforestation. In many ways, wood is an incredible, sustainable resource, but while it’s easy to cut trees down, technology for planting them hasn’t kept up.
A Canadian startup called Flash Forest is aiming to cut down on the manual labor and shovels by bringing in some 21st Century drone technology.
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Their goal is to plant one billion trees by 2028.
They estimate that once fully developed, one of their drones could automatically plant as many as 100,000 seed pods per day, compared to the roughly 1,500 seed pods a single human could plant.
Alongside the physical drone technology, Flash Forest has developed software for mapping a target area, and special seed pods.
Each pod contains a mix of seeds from the local ecosystem and a mix of moisture and nutrients to promote swift sprouting.
After a successful planting, the group returns to check on the site multiple times over months and even eventually years later to check on the progress and plant more seed pods if necessary.
Each pod costs about 50 cents to produce and with reduced time and labor, they estimate the whole process costs only a fifth of current planting practices.
In order to ramp up their efforts, they ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to raise $100,000. That money has gone towards improving the automation and mapping technology, as well as mass production of the seed pods.
Their next target is to plant 40,000 trees in an area north of Toronto that was burned out by a wildfire.
While they don’t pretend that planting more trees is the complete solution to climate change, they hope that their technology, once perfected, can play a large role in combating it.
h/t: Ladbible
