The drones planting trees from the sky
"We utilize heavy-lift drone swarms to reforest immediately after wildfires."
Seattle-based startup DroneSeed is on a mission to "make reforestation scaleable" by planting trees – literally – from the sky.
DroneSeed CEO Grant Canary.
"We're losing forest faster to wildfire than nature is regenerating it. And our systems today with nurseries and manual labor out there doing superhero's work, it's insufficient to keep up and keep the forests we have."
That’s where drones come in.
The company has been using its fleet to distribute tree seeds, fertilizerS and pest deterrent onto fire-damaged land to help speed up reforestation.
The drones – which are 8 feet in diameter – are capable of carrying 57 pounds worth of pucks
and flying eight to 18 minutes at a time.
Courtesy: DroneSeed
"The vessel is dry fibers, soaks up moisture, helps the seed avoid desiccation or drying out, has fertilizer, has natural pest deterrents like spicy pepper and the they're getting carried in 57-pound groupings and dropped onto the site…’’
Droneseed says its method plants trees six times faster than doing it manually.
Their projects are starting to cover lands of more than 1,000 acres.
And reforestation efforts are more urgent now than ever before.
2020 was the worst year on record in terms of destruction caused by wildfires across the U.S. West Coast.
"The way to think about this is not, oh, 2020 was a bad year. It's 2020 was the coolest year for the next hundred years. And so as we think about that, like we can choose a future in which we reforest each year and we have forests or we can look at where the trends are taking us and say there is a future in which there aren't forests in many states, if not all.’’
In addition to helping with reforestation, Droneseed says its mission also includes mitigating the effects of climate change via carbon capture.
By facilitating mass reforestation, Canary says the company offers a scalable solution to sequester carbon.
"It's just a question of are we going to build the tools? Are we going to respond to the damages and impacts that we've already made it by putting in the amount of carbon that's already in the atmosphere today out there. And so that's what our team has signed up for, is how can we be one of those tools? There are many other tools where we are by no means the only silver bullet solution, but we are the ones that are scalable today to buy us more time."
