Disclaimer: I majored in Forest Mensuration, and did my engineering diploma in Forest Plantations.
Disclaimer: I majored in Forest Mensuration, and did my engineering diploma in Forest Plantations.
I'd also be interrested in how these drones fare in different geography, I've manually planted a handful tens of thousands of trees in areas where you can't drive any vehicles - quite different from the rather large flat areas of Russia and Belarus.
I also manually planted lots of trees in different areas. Yes, you are right, when area is inaccessible and only manual planting is possible - drones may become helpful. But with 9 ha/day output, I am afraid it is cheaper to use human labour.
It's a square with 110 trees to a side. A rough overestimate at 20ft spacing gives us a guess of less than a quarter of a square mile per day, or maybe 75 square miles of saplings planted per year.
For comparison, the U.S. has something on the order of 3-3/4 million square miles of forest.
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=can...
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=mus...
https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=cot...
So, before i write this off as a complete waste of time, can you link me to any pictures or descriptions or even (gasp) books wherein i could learn about the PLA-1 or its successor, the PLA-1A? Cyrillic or english is fine.
The truth is that if you can drive a big tree planting tank there, you can also walk there. RPV delivered seeds seem like they would be useful for places that are not so easy to get to.
Also, and you may know this, forests are not trees; forests are biomes that rely on trees to support complex webs of interrelated life forms from a micro- to macroscopic scale. A giant, soviet era thing that plants saplings in bally great blocks sounds good on paper, but i wonder how well it actually works.
I probably should have worded my original query more specifically and in a manner that the HN pedants are more comfortable with. My apologies.
I am against industrial methods in anything, and this marginalizes me here in the West, and that is ok. People want to build money machines that crank out profit on a predictable schedule and that is fine in my book because i believe time will prove the error in that approach to living. If we want to get in the biology game, however, "crazy anarchists" and wierdos might have the upper hand in the idea arena, as trying to regiment everything, or even anything, in a massively complicated innately complex web of interaction that does not cease at any point is a fools errand.
...shit, i need a drone to come guide me back to my original point.
To me, this is the key part of the proposal, if the technique scales:
"at around 15% of the cost of traditional methods."
Also ,why isn't robot use in reforestation more common ? 12-24k plantings/hour sounds fantastic.
So, I dunno. GP sounds like they know what they're talking about, but I would still like to see some references.
[1] http://www.damcon.nl/en/machines/tree-planting-machines/tree...
According to GP:
>> Chinese mainland reforestation programme plan was 4 mln ha/year 20 years ago.
>> So, drones can plant, say pine seedlings with density of 4 thousand/ha (which is IMHO insufficient), which gives capacity of just 9 ha/day
Suppose 180 working days a year that would give: 4 * 10^6 / (180 * 9/2) ~= 5000 operators
That doesn't actually sound too bad, not sure how many drones per operator are counted for in the 36,000 trees per 2 operators with multiple drone numbers.
One a side note this could still be well above the cost of human labor in third-world countries.
UPD: here is the video instruction for this process https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6MhT7dbB1c
Another common tool (in the US at least) is the Hoedad. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1gPVuITMgc
Disclaimer: my forestry education is only from farming school.
The sorts of areas that desperately need replanting are usually a wasteland to stumps, branches, brush, and lots of rocks.