The drone can plant around 100,000 trees a day with minimal cost and can plant seedpods in places which are difficult to access.
Every year over billions of trees are lost due to various human and natural activities. When you start estimating the causes of deforestation or tree loss, the human activity influencing loss of trees tops the list. Activities such as conversion of forest for land use, illegal and unsustainable logging, fuelwood harvesting and mining are the major reasons for forest degradation.
Tree loss is directly linked to ecosystem imbalance
-The loss of trees or natural vegetation can globally cause issues such as loss of biodiversity, food and even jobs in many cases. The loss of forest can completely change the living pattern, and humans will be forced to the edge of danger. Under these circumstances, increasing afforestation and planting rate are very critical for countering climate change.
As per reports, the world chops around 15 billion trees a year and only 9 billion trees are planted in a year. The net loss is around 6 billion trees per year. There are many reasons why this loss is not compensated.
Following are some of the challenges –
• Current traditional methods are costlier since they require large workforce leading to issue of scalability.
• Accessibility to difficult terrain is challenging for human labor.
• No structured approach to monitoring and restoration projects.
To keep the pace of tree planting at par with the degradation, it is very critical to have a technological solution. Hand planting cannot be a solution, hence an engineering based company from UK BioCarbon has come up with a unique way of using aerial systems in tree planting.
A drone is used to plant trees. Firstly, the drone scans the area with a 3D map and then the inbuilt algorithm calculates the area and the number of trees to be planted. The drone carries with it a load of germinated seedpods encumbered with tree seed, nutrition, and food required for the tree to grow. The drone’s specialty is that it can plant up to 10 pods (trees) per minute or 300 pods per flight.
Further, in addition to planting, the drones can be used to monitor the germination and growth rate of trees planted.
Image Source: BioCarbon