Featured Image Credit: Instagram/airseedtech
Topics: Environment, Technology, Science
Jayden Collins
An Australian start-up is planning to plant 100 million trees by 2024 using an army of seed-firing drones.
In what seems to be the latest indication that we are living in the future, a fleet of highly advanced drones is helping the world fight biodiversity loss.
The start-up, called AirSeed Technology, is using artificial intelligence to find areas in need of some trees and firing seed pods from the sky. They're sort of like environmental superheroes. Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s a tree-planting drone.
CEO and co-founder of AirSeed Technology told euronews.green: “Each of our drones can plant over 40,000 seed pods per day and they fly autonomously. In comparison to traditional methodologies, that's 25 times faster, but also 80 per cent cheaper.”
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According to their website, 1.3 million square kilometres of trees have been deforested since 1990, while 15 billion trees are lost each year across the globe.
The company has already planted 50,000 trees and they have a goal to plant 100 million by 2024.
AirSeed says their pods are provided with a carbon-rich coating that gives them an important support system for the habitat below.
It protects them from birds, insects, and rodents and supports their germination, with their biotech setting them apart from other methods.
Walker said: “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.”
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The drones are given a predefined flight path and track the coordinates of each seed that it drops, allowing the company to assess the health of the trees as they grow.
Walker continued: “We're being very mindful of the fact that we need to restore soil health, we need to restore microbial communities within the soil, and we need to restore primary habitat providers for animals.”
Australian bushfires between July 2019 and February 20220 destroyed approximately 23 million acres of bushland, according to a Royal Commission into Natural Disaster Arrangements.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said: “The world has 10 years remaining to prevent a massive and destabilizing climate change through combined rapid phase-out of fossil fuels, reforestation and other natural climate solutions.”
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AirSeed is certainly attempting to prevent such disaster with its mission to increase the world’s forest cover by 0.9 billion hectares without impacting existing cities or agriculture.