Tree Planting Gets Airborne

There’s another amazing use for drones: reforesting areas that are otherwise hard to reach. A month ago, drones began their part to rapidly restore forest in the hills of Kosovo. This is not the first time drones have been used this way—they’ve also proven their worth seeding mangroves in Myanmar and replanting burn zones in California. A few years ago, dropping seeds from drones was considered experimental, but not anymore.

A drone operator controls one of a small swarm of drones operating over a recent burn area. Image source: DroneSeed Photo.

Drones overcome the logistical limitations of more traditional replanting methods. Typical reforestation involves hauling thousands of saplings, shovels, a little survey equipment, and some volunteers to the site. That often works, but some terrains offer distinct challenges. In rocky or hilly terrain, personnel may not be able to reach or bring saplings to part of the area that needs to be replanted. In wetlands, people and vehicles alike can spend more time digging themselves out of the mud than planting the mangroves they came to restore. Drones fly over all these obstacles, dropping their payload from a few feet up.

And drones are fast. Project 02—a Croatian company currently helping Kosovo replant rocky hillsides—told Reuters that a drone can replant an area 5 times faster than a person can. That speed is itself a resource: wide swathes can be replanted in a fraction of the time. Nurseries and manual planting won’t go away entirely—some seeds are too large for drones to handle—but the ability to cover 10 acres in a single day with one drone is a massive acceleration.

The other main difference from manual planting is that drones work with seeds, not saplings. Using seeds cuts out the need for months of growth in the nursery, but seeds are vulnerable to certain animals. Companies have experimented with a few different seed delivery systems, encasing the tree seed with the nutrients and moisture it needs to get started—and coating the seed with spicy pepper to fend off squirrels.

Large parts of the world need restoring, luckily humanity keeps getting faster and more efficient at fixing it.