The U.S. military has been using drones for years. Now, a new company called BioCarbon Engineering plans to use UAVs to wage war, too… against deforestation.
CEO Lauren Fletcher is a former NASA engineer, and he and his team are shooting (quite literally) for a billion trees a year. They’re working with drone experts at VulcanUAV, who don’t build dainty little flying machines that let you spy on your neighbors. They build muscular machines that can carry payloads up to 8 kilograms — perfect for the kind of work BioCarbon has planned.
Their planting system is a bit like a drone-mounted paintball gun. A pressurized air canister provides the force required to fire “rounds” into the ground. Instead of paintballs, the drones will shoot biodegradable, spherical pods which contain pre-germinated seeds and a nutrient-rich gel. Apart from serving up a nutritional boost to the seeds, the gel also provides a bit of protection during impact.
Before BioCarbon’s UAVs are sent out on a reforestation run, another set of drones head to the drop zone to do a bit of scouting. They produce detailed 3D maps of the area, which helps the team figure out where to send the planting drones and maximizes success rates.
BioCarbon’s drone fleet has some major advantages over traditional re-planting methods. For one thing, it’s cheaper than paying van loads of university students to manually plant trees while listening to Phish MP3s. It’s also more efficient than aerial drops, where there’s no guarantee that the seeds will actually germinate and take root.
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