
Startup attempting to use drones to plant 36,000 trees a day - nstart
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/exnasa-man-to-plant-one-billion-trees-a-year-using-drones-10160588.html
======
ommunist
This quantity is absolutely nothing. Area of the single forestry, let's say in
small Latvia is around 30 000 ha. 1Bn, I assume, is EU milliard. 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! I can't see anything
industrial in that. Chinese mainland reforestation programme plan was 4 mln
ha/year 20 years ago. Belarusian Soviet reforestation bot PLA-1 (Designed in
Homel) was able to make 12-24 thousand plantings per hour in ... 1977! What is
good in aerial drones - you do not need to remove tree stumps. Makes the whole
operation real safer and cheaper. But its capacity is still vary far from
industrial requirements in reforestation.

Disclaimer: I majored in Forest Mensuration, and did my engineering diploma in
Forest Plantations.

~~~
minthd
Can you please share more information about the reforestation bot PLA-1 ?

Also ,why isn't robot use in reforestation more common ? 12-24k plantings/hour
sounds fantastic.

~~~
vosper
I've been googling around, and I can't find anything online about the PLA-1. I
even tried "russian tree planting machine". General searches for tree planting
machines turned up this [1] at the top of the results, but they're only
claiming a max of 4000-5000 plantings per day - much less than GP claimed for
the PLA-1.

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...](http://www.damcon.nl/en/machines/tree-planting-
machines/tree-planting-machine-pl10/)

~~~
ommunist
Oh, in the same source there is a new one - МЛА-1А «Илана». Can plant forests
at 3,75km/h with same cassette feeder 4000 saplings per load on clearings
_with_ tree stumps (if stumps density is below 600 stumps/ha.

~~~
vosper
That seems pretty impressive, actually. Are these machines being marketed
outside of Belarus?

~~~
ommunist
No. No one tried to the best of my knowledge. I personally know to whom I may
address your potential enquiry, but I doubt the existing process of decision
making in Belarus will produce any fast answers. The best way is to go there
and talk if you are really interested.

~~~
vosper
Thanks for the offer, but I was just curious. If the machine is really
superior to what's on the market then it seems like a business opportunity for
someone with know-how and industry contacts - but that's not me :)

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xyzzy123
Made me wonder if you could get a big plane instead and just "cluster bomb" an
area with the tree pods. Then I read the article more closely, in particular
the reference to "dry tree seeding by air".

Found: [http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/old-
milit...](http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/old-military-
planes-could-drop-900000-tree-bombs-a-day.html) ("Old Military Planes Could
Drop 900,000 Tree-Bombs a Day")

Although the buzzword here is "drones", it seems (to my amateur eyes) like a
big part of the innovation is the pre-germinated tree pods.

~~~
brohee
You missed the part about them being dropped from 3m high, while the drone is
presumably stationary? There is no reason to believe the tree pod could
survive a harsher impact...

So planes are out, the helicopters too (can't get that low with trees around,
and way too expensive to fly anyway). Drones are definitely a very important
part of it...

~~~
Someone
Tree seeds regularly fall from greater heights, so the seeds can survive.

The pods will have a much larger terminal velocity, but I don't see how that
would make it problematic to toss them from, say, 50 meters high. Attach a
cheap piece of pulp paper (= easily bio-degradable) to the pods as an air
brake, if needed.

I have my doubts as to its cost effectiveness, too. I can't find calculations
on the project's site and I do not have data, either, but I would think those
pods must be fairly expensive, or drones incredibly cheap, or places where
trees can be planted must be extremely rare for this to be economically the
best choice.

~~~
brohee
The pod contain a germinated seed, aka a baby tree, presumably a lot more
fragile than a seed. The whole point of the invention is that they get more
trees that way than dropping seed from planes...

~~~
Someone
No, the claim is not that they get more trees; it is that they get them
cheaper.

I did not claim dropping pods at random would give the same success rate; the
thing I question is whether the investment needed to use these drones is more
effective than, say, buying five times the number of pods and throwing them
out of a plane (or even deploying them with a modified minefield thrower.)

Also, looking at the picture at
[http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article10160598.ece/al...](http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/article10160598.ece/alternates/w460/3044235-inline-i-1-this-
drone-startup-has-an-ambitious-crazy-plan-to-plant-one-billion-trees-a-
year.jpg), those germinated seeds aren't large. In my (limited) experience
handling such things, they are more fragile than seeds, but dropping them is
just fine.

For the rightmost two ones, it would help to plant them right side up, but you
aren't going to do that dropping it from a drone, either (hm, looking at it,
that picture probably isn't worth much as evidence; there's no way you are
going to have a relatively small pod burrow into the ground like that from any
height, let alone a few meters)

------
tajen
If the drone is slow, say 50mph, they still need to throw 7 plants per second.

I was a timber in the Australian outback (as a backpacker) and if you plant
trees more than 10 feet apart, the sun burns them up, even with a tropical
climate/wet season alternance. Like, pitch black wood. You need them close to
each other and minimum 5 rows together if you want a self-sustaining hedge
(and still the outer rows are doomed to die early). And I'm talking about
heavily irrigated areas [1] next to the Argyle lake in the Northern Territory
[2].

I guess not all places are like Australia, but those with desertification and
ecosystem deprecation will require many trees at once. I wonder how they'll
deal with this minimum critical mass problem. Overall this startup idea is
excellent, for example thick hedges for areas next to the Sahara can stop the
desert from advancing and revive the whole area within the perimeter, by
rehydrating the winds and restoring livable temperature.

[1] Heavily irriguated area above 38C all year long:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sandelholzplantagen_Kununu...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sandelholzplantagen_Kununurra.JPG)
[2] The whole page, with climate histograms:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kununurra,_Western_Australia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kununurra,_Western_Australia)

~~~
7952
I would be sceptical about using this to stop desertification. The plants
still need to be protected from livestock and kept watered. This doesn't solve
the underlying causes of vegetation loss that created the problem in the first
place.

~~~
fit2rule
The underlying problem is humans harvesting wood.

>I would be sceptical about using this to stop desertification.

Take a closer look at the Permaculture movement and the extremely effective
science developed around that scene on the subject of stopping desertification
- where this article specifically mentions _trees_ being dropped from the sky,
that's merely the outer limit. Grassland-dropping drones would also be
effective - its not just trees-as-species, but all the other bio-sphere in
between that matters.

Farmers using drones to drop mantis-packs is another potential use .. the sky
is literally the limit. What we don't have, is the drone systems that can be
readily deployable.

Yet.

~~~
maerF0x0
Subsistence farming 48%. Commercial agriculture 32%. Logging 14%. Fuel wood
removals 5%.

Source:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Causes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Causes)

------
nstart
Link to startup -
[http://www.biocarbonengineering.com/](http://www.biocarbonengineering.com/)

To the Mods. Not sure if this has been posted before. And not sure if link to
startup would be better. Please switch link if that would be better. Thanks :)

~~~
fuddle
A link to the article is better in my opinion.

~~~
laurentsabbah
Article definitely provides more info :)

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swalsh
Stupid question, but I've always wondered if it would be possible to
genetically engineer trees to consume more C02 then they already do? Seems
like a way to multiply efforts.

~~~
ohitsdom
I'd be really interested in this area of research, too. And not just trees-
what about smaller plants (even house plants)? I'd imagine an engineered
"heavy breather" that people could easily grow in their homes and yards could
make a measurable impact if widely adopted. It could also be tied in to a type
of carbon-based tax to encourage people towards a carbon-neutral lifestyle.

~~~
stouset
Plants don't just magick carbon away. They store the carbon as more plant.
Ergo, to offset the release of a pound of carbon, you need more than a pound
of plant. A typical American releases _tons_ of carbon per year (literally,
not figuratively), so to offset this will require tons of plant. Thousands of
pounds of houseplant per year is... impractical, to put it gently.

80ft tall, 24ft diameter hardwoods can hit 50 tons at maturity (50+ years). So
it seems that planting half a dozen to a dozen hardwoods would be enough to
mostly offset a typical American's lifetime carbon emissions. Of course, when
the tree dies, the carbon has to go somewhere.

~~~
bryondowd
Probably completely impractical, but this conversation gave me a picture of
people raising fast-growing plants in their homes/yards that they continually
'harvest'. This harvested matter than gets taken to a dump site and buried,
capturing the carbon underground.

I suppose the whole operation would have to either use solar power or be
extremely efficient to avoid burning as much or more carbon based fuel than it
buries.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Freeman Dyson proposed this solution a few years back. I honestly think it's
not being done because most huge companies prefer to spend a little money
(relatively speaking) on CCS research and kicking the can down the road.

------
meric
_26 billion trees are currently being burned down every year while only 15
billion are replanted._

Glad to see we're replanting a substantial amount of trees taken down every
year, this gap looks closable. I had in my mind much closer to 5% or 10%...

~~~
iwwr
The US and Europe is more forested now than it was 100 years ago, on average.
Wood is no longer needed for fuel and ship building. Most commercial logging
now goes on in managed 'tree farms' rather than virgin woodlands.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
Mind you, that's because 100 years ago a lot of it had been razed to the
ground to fuel the Industrial Revolution. "More forested than 100 years ago"
really means "slowly recovering from the damage we did."

I recall, about 20 years ago, my father driving us through the forests of West
Virginia to visit family, and pointing out that not one of the trees was more
than, say, 18 inches across (in my young memory, at least). There was plenty
of forest, but it was all _young_ forest. The old growth had been utterly
exterminated.

~~~
iwwr
North America was inhabited for thousands of years by the time Europeans
arrived and land tended to be managed as a matter of living on it. The thick
forests early European colonists encountered were the result of massive
depopulation of people and not 'natural' in that sense.

The idea of setting aside land for unmanaged old-growth forests is a modern
one and we're likely seeing it again for the first time since early colonial
times; back then it was inadvertent.

[http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.htm...](http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.html)

------
william_hc
I love the idea of a company being able to do good like this, but how does it
call itself a company if it's just planting trees? Who pays them?

~~~
sjtrny
Companies that sell carbon offset credits.

~~~
tajen
I love the carbon credits system, traded on the stock exchange. It's the most
lightweight and capitalistic incentive we can build around polluting
externalities.

~~~
gonvaled
Ah the irony: and the US government (the US being the pinnacle of capitalist
society) is refusing them at every chance. Isn't this what Kyoto was
proposing? Has not the US (effectively) killed Kyoto? Whatever carbon trading
is taking place in the US, is probably not internationally sanctioned.

The US practices this international tactic of dragging its feet as long as
possible, giving time to its companies to catch up with international
standards (and to hell with everything else if need be, environment be
damned!). At the same time, it will very willingly impose international
standards wherever they feel their local companies are at an advantage. This
is why lots of European population are skeptical of the TTIP: the US is
probably sending us a Trojan horse.

~~~
maerF0x0
its natural that players will attempt to modify the game (or keep it skewed in
their favor) . The externalities have always been there, but some industries
have never had to pay for them. I wouldnt be surprised if some industries are
not even profitable once you account for their externalities.

But macroenconomic principles mean nothing if you have greed. If one is
greedy, then its just a matter of maximizing what's on your plate, with no
regard of how much you're taking from others (potentially future generations)

------
maerF0x0
For comparisons sake a Canadian tree planter can plant roughly 3k 6" seedlings
in a day for a cost of about $400.

>"Fletcher doesn't pretend that the method is as good as hand-sowing, but it's
a hell of a lot quicker."

Also for comparisons sake, the expected survival rate of those 3k hand planted
trees is 50%.

~~~
chockablock
Tree planting is a pretty popular and lucrative summer-time gig for Canadian
college students (and other young people). It's paid by the tree, with the
price depending on the terrain and the planting rules (spacing, light and soil
conditions, depth). There is a lot of quality control done by supervisors, and
it takes a lot of skill to plant both well and quickly.

It would be interesting to hear some planters weigh in on the technology
described in the OP. Agree the "# of trees planted" is not the best metric--
the real question is how many of those will grow into mature trees.

Some background on the job: [http://www.tree-
planter.com/?navigation_id=90](http://www.tree-planter.com/?navigation_id=90)

~~~
grecy
My brother was a tree planter in Northern Alberta for 6 seasons, he was
earning in the range of $500 a day towards the end (he was good)

I went out to his camp for a couple of weeks and planted for a while.

IMO the proposed solution looks great. Obviously it's not perfect and needs
some refinement, but that's the whole point isn't it - we're always striving
to learn more and make things better.

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mpdehaan2
Copters take up a lot of power, more so if they need to drill and implant
payloads.

We should ponder the possiblity of more efficient lower-tech non-drone
options, like tree-howitzers, or maybe an A10 warthog with an acorn gun, or
some sort of honey-clusters-of-nuts cluster-bomb type payload for a B-52.

------
ch
Interesting. This guy should look to collaborate with Afforestt, who have a
working method to reforest an area in a reduced timescale:
[http://afforestt.com/index.html;](http://afforestt.com/index.html;) might be
a great outcome!

~~~
zo1
Typo in your link, by the way. The semi-colon breaks the link and we get a
404.

~~~
ch
Thanks for the heads up. Sadly I missed the edit window for the post.

Fixed link: [http://afforestt.com/](http://afforestt.com/)

------
josefresco
I went looking for a video of this in action but only found the following
which features some rudimentary animations:
[http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mo07q](http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2mo07q)

So good job on getting some press- let's see some hardware in action so we
have something to get excited about.

------
pvaldes
Is interesting, but there face some major problems that they will need to be
aware,

The worst is the big overpopulation of herbivores. We don't want to just feed
the goats. The real number is how many trees will survive at least ten years
not how many you can plant. I'll suggest to add some biodegradable mesh cover
to this capsules.

Other is that many wastelands have been burned and lost his soil and are
basically bare rock. A human can search for most favourable crevices but a
drone normally can't have this level of accuracy. If we start trowing capsules
to bare rock we just will have a lot of plant failures upside down drying at
the sun

And of course many birds will do gladly this work almost for free if you just
put a fence, some shelter and several birdfeeders with soft fruits, figs or
accorns.

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classicsnoot
I know it is too late for this to get fixed, but i am so tires of people
saying "drone" when they mean "RPV". This idea in particular would be much
more capable if they actually did use Drones instead of RPVs.

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alexpw
Speed and automation of planting is one thing, and awesome to see!

The second part is to optimize for the speed of tree growth. I can't locate
the post, but a man/company had learned of a way to regrow trees faster,
significantly reducing the number of years needed. It definitely had something
to do with supplying nutrients, but placement may also have been involved.

I hope this startup communicates and investigates speed of growth, rather than
simply planting, so they can have an even bigger impact; however, it's great
to see, either way.

~~~
sasvari

      I can't locate the post, but a man/company had learned of
      a way to regrow trees faster, significantly reducing the
      number of years needed.
    

This might be the post you are referencing:

 _How to Grow a Forest Really Really Fast_

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074473](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9074473)

~~~
alexpw
That was it, thanks!

------
spyder
And how are the pods made? Hopefully it's also somewhat automated and fast,
otherwise the drones would quickly run out of pods to plant.

------
fillskills
26 billion trees are currently being burned down every year while only 15
billion are replanted. - How did they come to these numbers?

~~~
brink
It's also a little misleading because trees do get planted without human
intervention.

~~~
kansface
Sure, and they die outside of human intervention too.

------
robotkilla
They should genetically mark these, patent the DNA, and then license the
rights to chop down trees.

~~~
greggyb
Or, much cheaper and legally unquestionable:

Buy cheap land; plant trees; sell land or logging rights.

No need to try to enforce a property right over something on someone else's
land 20+ years in the future.

------
facepalm
Is planting trees really a problem? I was under the impression that trees
basically plant themselves if you let them.

Also don't think you can simply replant the rain forest.

~~~
josefresco
You need to look no further than the third sentence of the article to answer
your question:

"26 billion trees are currently being burned down every year while only 15
billion are replanted."

~~~
facepalm
That doesn't imply that it's technical issues that prevent replanting. In many
regions of the earth, people simply don't care about replanting. And as I
said, I don't think you can just replant a burnt down forest.

------
netcan
These pods sound like a new and improved coconut.

------
acd
What is wrong with natural birds?

~~~
crististm
they don't have "drone" in their names

~~~
Raphmedia
Easy. Call your trained birds "bio-drones".

------
JoeAltmaier
Do this on Mars, then you've got something!

------
amelius
But what about biodiversity?

~~~
ph0rque
[http://www.biocarbonengineering.com/blog/restoring-
ecosystem...](http://www.biocarbonengineering.com/blog/restoring-ecosystems)

------
vinayparamesh
Good luck Matt!!

