Drone, the future Brahmastra for Reforestation!

NewsBharati    06-Jan-2018
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London, January 6: We are chopping down about 15 billion trees a year and planting about 9 billion. So there’s a net loss of 6 billion trees a year. It is estimated that the world loses between 74,000 and 95,000 square miles of forest a year. Hand planting trees is slow and expensive. To keep pace with the tractors and bulldozers clearing vast areas of land, we need an industrial-scale solution.

So BioCarbon Engineering, a UK-based company backed by drone manufacturer Parrot, has come up with a method of planting trees quickly and cheaply.

The drone can plant up to 100,000 trees a day. This is much needed in every country for reforestation. The system’s engineers estimate that their method is about 10 times faster and only 20% of the cost of hand planting. And because there is no heavy machinery involved, it’s possible to plant in hard-to-reach areas that have no roads or steep, inaccessible terrain.

 

First, a drone scans the topography to create a 3D map. Then the most efficient planting pattern for that area is calculated using algorithms. A drone loaded with germinated seeds fires pods into the ground at a rate of one per second, or about 100,000 a day. Scale this up and 60 drone teams could plant 1 billion trees a year.