They say that it's more efficient to use a drone than to manually plant a tree or seed. Yes, blasting seeds out of a potato cannon would also be much more efficient if the goal is to spread unsuccessful seeds. If the goal is to get to a mature tree or forest, then I doubt it's more efficient at all.
Forrests are self-sustaining. But recreating a clear-cut forrest usually requires a bit more care than just chucking seeds around.
Successful trees need the seeds to be planted under the earth.
Lockheed Martin had a plan to make baby tree missiles to be dropped from the sky [1] and they'll embed themselves nicely into the earth thanks to the terminal velocity energy.
Trouble is, they'll also probably kill all animals in the forest they happen to impale on their way down.
[1] https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/1467/Planes-Can-Plant-1-Billi...
Is this actually that big of a deal? Unless they're literally carpet-bombing the place I'd expect the collateral damage to be minimal.
I guess you can also adjust the schedule of the operation at times where the most common animals in the target area aren't active and are unlikely to be out in the line of fire.
Air-dropping pinecones and seeds, however, might be sufficient (and very fast). Cones and seeds are already designed to fall at/near terminal velocity and later on yield a tree.
It'd definitely make me smile to see a Hercules flying across recently-logged terrain or historically-deforested offloading tons of seeds that drift to the ground to start a new life.
I doubt human casualties or even injuries are acceptable.
A potential solution would be to announce the operation months/years in advance and actively prohibit access to the areas during that time.
Aerial seeding is an established practice with quite a history:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_seeding
https://www.deseret.com/2000/10/28/19536330/forest-service-i...
To quote: "Using a helicopter to broadcast native plant seeds, conservation officials of Wasatch-Cache National Forest have begun to rehabilitate parts of the Stansbury Mountains burned in last summer's wildfires."
This is an article from 2000.
It is very widely used to re-seed remote locations which would be hard or hazardous to approach on foot.
How do seeds arrive on the ground from trees, naturally?
Anyway, there's a lot of them. At first I was hand pulling them, but after I identified them I realized I could probably just mow them and, once they've had their sprouting leaves chopped off, they'll just starve.
But the relevant point of my story is that I learned that: a) apparently (some) trees really do just disperse ridiculous amounts of seedlings, many of which do germinate and at least begin to grow. b) since I've never seen Maple trees growing in dense thickets like bamboo, I'm assuming that the vast majority of seedlings die off (and in fact a lot of the seedlings are sprouting in clearly terrible conditions that won't make sense once they're just a tiny bit larger -- in shallow soil, in deep shade, etc).
I'm a bit less skeptical that drone-based seeding would work thanks to this, though have no opinion on if that's an improvement over humans doing the seeding in terms of success and efficiency.
These trees are valued for furniture in Asia, but are invasive pests elsewhere, yet are still promoted by plant nurseries.
Many species of both animals & plants use the "spray and pray" mechanism of reproduction. Create enough gametes and by sheer numbers, some of them will eventually turn into adults.
That doesn't mean this approach will be successful for artificial reforestation. The numbers are fairly different for ensuring that the total number of seeds cast off by a maple or pine tree over its lifetime results in one successor tree, vs. trying to recreate a clear-cut forest from seed stocks delivered by drone.
Wot? have you not seen a Sycamore?
https://blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org/allin/2017/11/12/f...
That is traditionally how seeds spread...
Basically all tree seeds are spread by air, except perhaps ones that travel though an animal and get "planted" in droppings. Trees don't usually have seed drills.
To be fair, the germination rate of the average tree seed is probably in the millionths, which is why they make so many.
Those numbers would be very small. The percentage of the area of a forest that has the body of an animal directly above it is quite low.
"These pods are manufactured using waste biomass, providing a carbon rich coating that protects the seeds from birds, insects and rodents."
> "The niche really lies in our biotech, which is the support system for the seed once it's on the ground," says Walker.
“It protects the seed from different types of wildlife, but also supports the seed once it germinates and really helps deliver all of those nutrients and mineral sources that it needs, along with some probiotics to really boost early-stage growth."
No idea how credible this is of course.
This does not seem excessive in regards of the time it saves.
Cover crop seeds (basically grasses) and tree seeds are apples and oranges. You can spray grass seed on the surface of the dirt and it will grow into a meadow. The same can not be said for trees. They will be eaten by birds and mice and digested, not dispersed. They also don't germinate well when left on the surface of the soil.
It's also a matter of numbers - tree seeds are by comparison, incredibly expensive to harvest. There's an industry of people who will camp out in forests, stalk squirrels, and see where they're storing their nuts. Or they climb trees to manually harvest fresh pinecones. It's labor intensive and you need a permit to do it.
Given we don't have squirrels in Australia, I'd imagine the knowledge you're providing here around gathering and permits are not accurate to the company in discussion.
Once they're baby trees, then you go plant them by hand in areas that need reforestation.
These drones are randomly throwing out seeds. The 1% is a seed germination rate. A germinated seed does not equate to a tree being planted.
Regardless of what choices are made it seems likely to me that someone's automation in this area is already capable of doing about as well as careful management in some places with high labor costs. From equality, an automated system can easily double it's yield every few years while a managed system is going to be lucky with 20% improvement?
Really improving seed performance and dispersion by orders of magnitude from natural with automation never has to get anywhere near as good as a manual system of trying to raise every tree.
A coffee bean weights 132.5 milligrams. 40k of those is ~5.3 kgs of beans. Sure it would be inefficient to employ all of those beans if only 200 of them end up being viable. But if those "wasted" 5 kg beans saves labour, then it might make economical sense. And if the alternative is running some sort of heavier planter machine, it might end up producing less emissions.
For the record I have not done real numbers here and my gut instinct is that the drone thing is a gimmick. I'm just trying to keep an open mind.
Reforestation projects that I have heard work well, works with ecological succession. Once clear cut, if grass gets into there, then that’s more difficult because soil ecology has changed to favor grasses.
But dumping a bunch of mulch will favor forest soil and favorable conditions for a forest. Mulch from cut trees usually go to the landfill, with arborists having to pay for it.
More fundamental ways are changing the way water flows through a system. Water just needs to be slowed down enough to accumulate organic materials. This video is about how the Arizona canal inadvertently created a water-harvesting structure that kicked off native wild growth along the bearm: https://youtu.be/jf8usAesJvo
Probably read about it in the Humbolt State Alumni magazine since they clear-cut the hell out of the redwoods in the ‘80s and HSU has* a really good forestry department that studies these sorts of things.
* had? They’re now a ‘polytechnic’ so don’t know what to call them anymore — Cal Poly Humboldt maybe?
They later return to the site via GPS data to monitor and verify their success.
https://dronedj.com/2022/01/07/airseed-technologies-works-to...
Isn't that the entire point of using a ton of seeds? It's cheap and you only need N of them to sprout, so you just try to plant as many as you need to reach N viable ones. Seems like a weird way to dismiss the approach.
I had a friend who was doing tree planting during the summers back in the college days. They were planting tree saplings, and even then many did not survive. It’s a numbers game. However, this is a difficult and expensive solution.
If they can spread lots of seeds on the cheap and get results then more power to them!
The problem is that monoculture forests aren’t actually all that great, better than nothing but not that great either.
In either case, it doesn't bode well for this startup's claimed goal. I'm sure their bank account on the other hand will be fine though.
It's neat technology, and I hope they succeed, I just worry it's a cheap way to say "we're planting thousands of trees" while doing very little of value.
In a few minutes, you can find out by watching episode 3 of Life on Earth: The First Forests[1] from time index 20:41, linked here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2i44t3?start=1241