prasad1
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Deforestation remains a huge problem, but drones could help solve that.
Image: REUTERS/Feisal Omar
It’s simple maths. We are chopping down about 15 billion trees a year and planting about 9 billion. So there’s a net loss of 6 billion trees a year.
Hand planting trees is slow and expensive. To keep pace with the tractors and bulldozers clearing vast areas of land, we need an industrial-scale solution.
For example, a drone that can plant up to 100,000 trees a day.
BioCarbon Engineering, a UK-based company backed by drone manufacturer Parrot, has come up with a method of planting trees quickly and cheaply. Not only that, trees can also be planted in areas that are difficult to access or otherwise unviable.
Planting by drone
First a drone scans the topography to create a 3D map. Then the most efficient planting pattern for that area is calculated using algorithms.
A drone loaded with germinated seeds fires pods into the ground at a rate of one per second, or about 100,000 a day. Scale this up and 60 drone teams could plant 1 billion trees a year.
These drones can plant 100,000 trees a day
Drones could fight deforestation by planting 1 billion trees a year.
www.weforum.org
