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.
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.
[1] https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/1467/Planes-Can-Plant-1-Billi...