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Former NASA Engineer wants to plant 1 Billion trees per year, with Drones


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http://www.vancouversun.com/business/Tree+planting+sure+what+once/11132074/story.html

Planting trees isn't what it used to be. Back in the late 70's tree planters could make the equivalent of doctors wages, but in the past 30 years there hasn't been a year in which people haven't complained about making less money than the year before. And now most earn less than minimum wage. That's what you'd call a decline.

Lack of financial gain aside, tree planting is a grueling job, and only the most dedicated wilderness explorer types will be attracted to it.

Logging in on a dropoff because of a decline in harvestable trees, despite the replanting done in the past. With the pine beetle ravaging millions of hectares in BC, you get the sense that the forest industry might not be sustainable.

But there is hope.

Enter the drones.

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/former-nasa-engineer-plans-plant-1-billion-trees-year-using-drones

Industrial deforestation is responsible for the destruction of forests worldwide and results in disruptive effects on their ecosystems, including reduced biodiversity, increased soil erosion and the release of greenhouse gas emissions, to name a few.

Planting a tree takes a lot longer than cutting one down, and it's a relatively slow and expensive process. Fortunately, a solution may be on the horizon.

BioCarbon Engineering, the brainchild of former NASA engineer Lauren Fletcher, has proposed a solution: Industrial reforestation with robot drones. Could reforestation get any more awesome?

The drones would plant an estimated 1 billion trees a year, saving people from having to do it by hand. This would make reforestation quicker and cheaper. However, Fletcher doesn’t say that this new method of reforestation is necessarily better than planting trees by hand, just cheaper. If put into full effect, the drone method of planting trees could cut the price of traditional practices down to 15% of the original cost.

The drones won’t indiscriminately fire seeds anywhere they happen to fly over. Instead, the machines will first gather terrain data and information on the local fauna, reporting back on the region's “restoration potential.”

When the restoration potential is approved, and the region is ready to support new seeds, a planting route is mapped for the drones to follow. The drones then fire the ground with germinated seed pellets at a rate of 10 seeds per minute.

The drones’ jobs aren’t done once the seeds are planted. They will also perform plant audits to monitor the ecosystem over time. This is important to assess how effective the drones were and what improvements can be made in the future.

The entire process is called "precision planting." In order for it to have the greatest benefit on the ecosystem, the team plans to work alongside local reforestation organizations to best match the biodiversity requirements of each individual region.

Drone-powered reforestation is a good solution to deforestation; however, it's treating the symptoms, not the problem. Deforestation wreaks havoc on ecosystems, and while it’s great to have a method that quickly and cheaply replants trees, it may be better to reduce large-scale deforestation first.

This development in technology will help, but like the article says, deforestation is the real problem.

Considering our ever-growing need to scrub CO2 out of our atmosphere, we better start planting these billions of trees fairly quickly, and not just for harvesting purposes.

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It's nice to have options for natural issues like pine beetle and forest fires, but I think if the industrial deforestation (logging, mining, drilling) is done properly, leaving enough wildlife patches, riparian zones, clean waterways, fertile soil, this'd be somewhat redundant. Those areas will naturally regenerate on their own. The point of tree planting (seedlings vs. germinated seeds) is to speed up the process. They want free to grow trees that are taller than their competition in +/-10 yrs.

Everything else they're talking about, using drones to map and survey and all that, that's already happening.

/ former planter

also this

Could reforestation get any more awesome?

No way the drones would party as hard as those lovable dirtbags.

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a billion trees a yr would pull 48 billion pounds of carbon out of atmosphere plant 10 billion you reverse global warming plus have a huge asset in new forests for building and manufacturing sectors

The irony. You want to reverse global warming but at the same time you want more logs for more fuel and more building. The cycle does its work.

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a billion trees a yr would pull 48 billion pounds of carbon out of atmosphere plant 10 billion you reverse global warming plus have a huge asset in new forests for building and manufacturing sectors

We're in the last stages of an ice age, you can't reverse the warming of the planet, nor should you.

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We're in the last stages of an ice age, you can't reverse the warming of the planet, nor should you.

We've already effected the planet by wiping out a lot of biodiversity. We're just putting back what we shouldn't have taken out.

There's normal orbital and axis wobbles. But the last thing we need is a runaway greenhouse effect turning our little oasis of a planet into a hell like Venus. And where did you get this ice age stuff? The last time we had an ice age Vancouver was under .5 mile of glaciers.

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