Tree Planting Drones Are Shooting Seed Missiles To Help The World's Forests

In September, the company Biocarbon Engineering used drones to plant mangrove seeds near Yangon, Myanmar.

The company has found that those mangrove saplings are now 20 inches tall, and Biocarbon Engineering is ready to repeat the process, but on a larger scale.

According to Fast Company, Irina Fedorenko, Biocarbon Engineering co-founder, had this to say:

"We now have a case confirmed of what species we can plant and in what conditions. We are now ready to scale up our planting and replicate this success."

The drones map the land as they fly over it, and learn about the soil characteristics and the area's topography to figure out the best places to plant the seeds.

They also have to figure out the best conditions, as tides can also wipe the new seeds away.

Fedorenko says the initiative aims to bring new jobs to people struggling to survive, and can help with local communities.

"The project in Myanmar is all about community development and enabling people to care for trees, providing them with jobs, and making environmental restoration in a way that it’s profitable for people."

"We train local people to be drone pilots, and they want that. They want to be in IT. They want to process data, they want to fly drones, they want to do agroforestry, they want to do regenerative agriculture, they want to create vertical farms, they want to do all this cool stuff. It’s not the ambition to be a seedling planter for $1 a day."

Unilad writes that researchers say there's enough space on the planet to plant 1.2 trillion trees, which could eat up a whole lot of carbon that the world and its humans put out.

Federenko says they're also trying to undo some of what man has already undone.

"The forest didn’t vanish by itself — the forest was cut down by local people," she says.