I very much doubt many of these seeds will be successful.
They say that it's more efficient to use a drone than to manually plant a tree or seed. Yes, blasting seeds out of a potato cannon would also be much more efficient if the goal is to spread unsuccessful seeds. If the goal is to get to a mature tree or forest, then I doubt it's more efficient at all.
Forrests are self-sustaining. But recreating a clear-cut forrest usually requires a bit more care than just chucking seeds around.
Yeah, I also doubt their claims. Spreading seeds from the air you're basically spreading bird food.
Successful trees need the seeds to be planted under the earth.
Lockheed Martin had a plan to make baby tree missiles to be dropped from the sky [1] and they'll embed themselves nicely into the earth thanks to the terminal velocity energy.
Trouble is, they'll also probably kill all animals in the forest they happen to impale on their way down.
> Trouble is they'll also probably kill all animals in the forest they happen to impale on their way down.
Is this actually that big of a deal? Unless they're literally carpet-bombing the place I'd expect the collateral damage to be minimal.
I guess you can also adjust the schedule of the operation at times where the most common animals in the target area aren't active and are unlikely to be out in the line of fire.
It's dropping dirt-bullets out of the sky with enough momentum to penetrate dirt -- probably enough to penetrate most flesh.
Air-dropping pinecones and seeds, however, might be sufficient (and very fast). Cones and seeds are already designed to fall at/near terminal velocity and later on yield a tree.
It'd definitely make me smile to see a Hercules flying across recently-logged terrain or historically-deforested offloading tons of seeds that drift to the ground to start a new life.
True - my point wasn’t to imply that you’ll have no animal casualties at all, but that unless you’re literally dropping one shell per square meter, the casualty rate would be acceptable.
When it comes to human casualties, “unreachable places” probably won’t cut it. You’ll need to be 100% sure there are no humans in there at all, short of maybe uncontacted/unknown hominid species.
A potential solution would be to announce the operation months/years in advance and actively prohibit access to the areas during that time.
To quote: "Using a helicopter to broadcast native plant seeds, conservation officials of Wasatch-Cache National Forest have begun to rehabilitate parts of the Stansbury Mountains burned in last summer's wildfires."
This is an article from 2000.
It is very widely used to re-seed remote locations which would be hard or hazardous to approach on foot.
Why doesn't it work for trees? I can't stop trees from growing in my yard from seeds blowing in, I genuinely don't understand why just spreading seeds aerially isn't effective
Partly, it's a matter of volume. You're getting more wayward seeds spread on your lawn by a couple orders of magnitude, than what a drones will be sprinkling in coconut coir pucks or compacted dirt balls.
My yard currently has a bunch of maple tree seedlings sprouting up. At first I didn't know what they were and it took a lot of googling "what kind of weed is this" to find out. Since maple trees aren't usually considered "weeds," it took a while to identify these plants.
Anyway, there's a lot of them. At first I was hand pulling them, but after I identified them I realized I could probably just mow them and, once they've had their sprouting leaves chopped off, they'll just starve.
But the relevant point of my story is that I learned that:
a) apparently (some) trees really do just disperse ridiculous amounts of seedlings, many of which do germinate and at least begin to grow.
b) since I've never seen Maple trees growing in dense thickets like bamboo, I'm assuming that the vast majority of seedlings die off (and in fact a lot of the seedlings are sprouting in clearly terrible conditions that won't make sense once they're just a tiny bit larger -- in shallow soil, in deep shade, etc).
I'm a bit less skeptical that drone-based seeding would work thanks to this, though have no opinion on if that's an improvement over humans doing the seeding in terms of success and efficiency.
I remember reading that some trees purposely create non viable seeds in great numbers. The theory is it makes it energy inefficient for animals to sort through the chaff searching for viable seeds to eat.
One princess tree (also called empress tree) will drop tens or hundreds of thousands of seeds every year, of which most usually zero will grow into a new tree.
These trees are valued for furniture in Asia, but are invasive pests elsewhere, yet are still promoted by plant nurseries.
Many species of both animals & plants use the "spray and pray" mechanism of reproduction. Create enough gametes and by sheer numbers, some of them will eventually turn into adults.
That doesn't mean this approach will be successful for artificial reforestation. The numbers are fairly different for ensuring that the total number of seeds cast off by a maple or pine tree over its lifetime results in one successor tree, vs. trying to recreate a clear-cut forest from seed stocks delivered by drone.
> Spreading seeds from the air you're basically spreading bird food. Successful trees need the seeds to be planted under the earth.
Basically all tree seeds are spread by air, except perhaps ones that travel though an animal and get "planted" in droppings. Trees don't usually have seed drills.
To be fair, the germination rate of the average tree seed is probably in the millionths, which is why they make so many.
I mean, they at least claim that solving this problem constitutes the actual secret sauce of their project:
> "The niche really lies in our biotech, which is the support system for the seed once it's on the ground," says Walker.
“It protects the seed from different types of wildlife, but also supports the seed once it germinates and really helps deliver all of those nutrients and mineral sources that it needs, along with some probiotics to really boost early-stage growth."
It’s not credible. I know people that work at this kind of company. None of the countermeasures have been successful and the germination rate is less than 1%.
Cover crop seeds (basically grasses) and tree seeds are apples and oranges. You can spray grass seed on the surface of the dirt and it will grow into a meadow. The same can not be said for trees. They will be eaten by birds and mice and digested, not dispersed. They also don't germinate well when left on the surface of the soil.
It's also a matter of numbers - tree seeds are by comparison, incredibly expensive to harvest. There's an industry of people who will camp out in forests, stalk squirrels, and see where they're storing their nuts. Or they climb trees to manually harvest fresh pinecones. It's labor intensive and you need a permit to do it.
> There's an industry of people who will camp out in forests, stalk squirrels, and see where they're storing their nuts. Or they climb trees to manually harvest fresh pinecones. It's labor intensive and you need a permit to do it.
Given we don't have squirrels in Australia, I'd imagine the knowledge you're providing here around gathering and permits are not accurate to the company in discussion.
What if a drone were to shoot the seeds into the ground with such force that they would be buried 4-5 inches deep (which is, I would guess, the necessary depth for successful propagation)?
It's more like 1 in 3, an order of magnitude better. And they'd be sown under cover in more controlled conditions before planting out; not just tossed in the ground.
No, this is hearsay, and I'm only passing on information I've heard from people that work at companies in this space and in silviculture (lots of companies are trying to crack the "plant trees with drones" nut).
I think a sapling planter plants more than their salary in saplings, so a comparison to the human sapling planter is false equivalence. I also don't see the difficulty in waiting until a seed has germinated in a nutrition disc before releasing it if you want to focus on getting 80% germination.
Regardless of what choices are made it seems likely to me that someone's automation in this area is already capable of doing about as well as careful management in some places with high labor costs. From equality, an automated system can easily double it's yield every few years while a managed system is going to be lucky with 20% improvement?
Really improving seed performance and dispersion by orders of magnitude from natural with automation never has to get anywhere near as good as a manual system of trying to raise every tree.
That's nothing, and in addition to that, it's a huge waste of seeds (these companies are buying up all the available seed for certain species of trees, which means net fewer trees planted). Manually planting already germinated baby trees is more efficient both in terms of hours and labor spent and has a higher germination rate.
Yes but do they use AI and machine learning? Do they hover in place and look cool? They don’t even have a cool name like “drone.” I guess you probably also can’t mass produce and automate experienced tree planters too. While they’re swilling coffee they could be launching hundreds or even thousands of AI powered drones shooting fancy seed pods everywhere. You can’t stop progress John Henry.
Depending on the seed that might be enough. The same way just adding another machine to a cloud might be more economic than employing 2 engineers for a year in order to make a system more efficient.
A coffee bean weights 132.5 milligrams. 40k of those is ~5.3 kgs of beans. Sure it would be inefficient to employ all of those beans if only 200 of them end up being viable. But if those "wasted" 5 kg beans saves labour, then it might make economical sense. And if the alternative is running some sort of heavier planter machine, it might end up producing less emissions.
For the record I have not done real numbers here and my gut instinct is that the drone thing is a gimmick. I'm just trying to keep an open mind.
I don't think emissions should be a concern at all for a reforestation project, unless orders of magnitude more waste is emitted compared to that absorbed by a tree over, say, 10-20 years. Forests pay long term dividends beyond carbon capture.
I don’t know about a forest, but seed bombing is something that guerrilla gardners have used to reintroduce native plants back into blighted urban areas.
Reforestation projects that I have heard work well, works with ecological succession. Once clear cut, if grass gets into there, then that’s more difficult because soil ecology has changed to favor grasses.
But dumping a bunch of mulch will favor forest soil and favorable conditions for a forest. Mulch from cut trees usually go to the landfill, with arborists having to pay for it.
More fundamental ways are changing the way water flows through a system. Water just needs to be slowed down enough to accumulate organic materials. This video is about how the Arizona canal inadvertently created a water-harvesting structure that kicked off native wild growth along the bearm: https://youtu.be/jf8usAesJvo
I’ve read where they study reforestation and it’s a whole process where ‘pioneer species’ pave the way to ‘proper’ forest plants.
Probably read about it in the Humbolt State Alumni magazine since they clear-cut the hell out of the redwoods in the ‘80s and HSU has* a really good forestry department that studies these sorts of things.
* had? They’re now a ‘polytechnic’ so don’t know what to call them anymore — Cal Poly Humboldt maybe?
Have you researched at all or are you just dismissing the entirety of their work? Did you know they plan for an efficacy rate and over-seed? There's no downside. They've thought about all of this before.
Have you researched at all or are you just assuming the entirety of their claims? Did you know they lie about their efficacy rate? There's no upside. They've thought about nothing but how to make money from carbon credits.
> I very much doubt many of these seeds will be successful.
Isn't that the entire point of using a ton of seeds? It's cheap and you only need N of them to sprout, so you just try to plant as many as you need to reach N viable ones. Seems like a weird way to dismiss the approach.
If there are chipmunks or squirrels the job is done on arrival. Those little guys are outrageously industrious at burying excess seeds and nuts, everywhere they can. I'll betcha order Rodentia is responsible for planting many times more trees than Primates. We should bioengineer them for our future teraforming jobs.
I had a friend who was doing tree planting during the summers back in the college days. They were planting tree saplings, and even then many did not survive. It’s a numbers game. However, this is a difficult and expensive solution.
If they can spread lots of seeds on the cheap and get results then more power to them!
To me it seems like if you only need a few to be successful then doing it manually will be just as effective (since you're doing it manually, your success rate will be much higher).
In either case, it doesn't bode well for this startup's claimed goal. I'm sure their bank account on the other hand will be fine though.
Workers don't plant seeds, they plant seedlings (that are 2-4 years old, depending on species). You get a much higher survival rate that way. It's costly, but so far it's the most efficient way. Maybe drones will change that eventually, but I doubt it'll do it by firing seeds.
Areas that are too remote aren't typically the ones that get deforested though - generally trees are removed either because they're valuable (and if you can bring trees out, you can bring seedlings in) or because the land is wanted (which usually means it's accessible).
It's neat technology, and I hope they succeed, I just worry it's a cheap way to say "we're planting thousands of trees" while doing very little of value.
They say that it's more efficient to use a drone than to manually plant a tree or seed. Yes, blasting seeds out of a potato cannon would also be much more efficient if the goal is to spread unsuccessful seeds. If the goal is to get to a mature tree or forest, then I doubt it's more efficient at all.
Forrests are self-sustaining. But recreating a clear-cut forrest usually requires a bit more care than just chucking seeds around.