BioCarbon Engineering wants to employ drones to counter industrial scale deforestation, utilizing the technology to plant one billion trees in a year, without having to be on the ground.
Currently, at least 26 billion trees are being burned down while only 15 billion are replanted each year. If the drone start-up is successful, the enterprise could help solve this shortage in a great way.
Hand-planting is very slow and quite expensive at that. With the drone innovation, reforestation will be streamlined substantially. Presently, studies claim that there are only two truly intact forests left on earth - the Amazon and the Congo. This is excluding the forests carved up by highways and roads
The biggest challenge facing natural forests since time in memorial is deforestation due to effects of human settlement. Although forests can be safeguarded from large-scale development, they can be damaged by wide roads snaking through them.
According to Haddad, almost 20 percent of forests remaining in the world are the size of a football field or approximately 100 meters away from the forest edges. 70 percent of forest lands are surrounded by half a mile of forest edge. This shows that nearly none of the forests can be considered as such.
This shocking revelation begs the need to tip the balance of scale (reforestation vs. deforestation) in order to save our environment. The diversity of plants and animals, which are greatly being affected, can reduce from 13 to 75 percent in fragmented habitats if the issue is not addressed soon and fast.
Another issue other than the food chain being skewed is that the effects of deforestation may only become evident much later and worsen over time.
The study claims that the consequences of the present fragmentation will continue to surface for decades and we still haven’t experienced the full capacity of what our destruction of forests has fashioned.
Lauren Fletcher remarked that the only way we’re going to solve these persistent issues regarding deforestation is by embracing the techniques that weren’t available before. She believes we can match the problem scale by using the drone approach.
BioCarbon planting system is more advanced than the traditional dry seeding by air hence should provide better results. First of all, drones survey the area and give a report on its likelihood for restoration, and then they fly two to three meters above ground and shoot out pods carrying pre-germinated seeds engulfed in a nutritious hydrogel.
“The method is not as good as hand-planting, but it’s much faster,” said Fletcher. He believes it possible to seed about 36,000 trees in a day, which is around 15 percent of the cost of traditional methods by having two operations managing several drones.
By the end of summer, the company and a prototype for the system excited at the Drones for Good competition in the United Arab Emirates hopes to have a complete operational version.