Arbor Day is a holiday many countries dedicate to planting trees, but with the steady encroachment of climate change, we need to maximize our time. Dronecoria doesn’t just plant a tree; it sows “hectares in minutes.” A hectare is 10,000 square meters or 2.471 acres. These aren’t the drones you’re looking for if you intend a weekend of gardening, this is in the scope of repopulating a forest with trees or reinvigorating a park with wildflowers. The seed balls in the hopper are 10kg of native seeds coupled with beneficial microorganisms to help the chances of each drop.
The drone’s body is laser cut from what looks like baltic birch plywood. The vector files are available in Illustrator (.ai) and CAD (.dxf) formats released under Creative Commons BY-SA, so give credit if you redistribute or remix it. In the 3D realm, you’ll need a SeedShutter and SeedDisperser, and both models are available in STL format.
We have other non-traditional seed spreading methods like canons, but it is a big job, and if you’ve build something to pitch in, drop us a tip!
For the moment I thought they were dropping 10kg balls. Then I realised you meant 10kg of small seed balls.
Both are impressive in terms of load capacity, but the former is very scary!
I wonder if Boston Dynamics’ “Spot” may be a good choice for this sort of terrain-tolerant automation.
fortunately i live in a part of the world where trees pop up like dandelions and get treated in about the same way. the phrase “terminate with extreme prejudice” is appropriate in describing how to deal with the situation. somehow logging is not permitted in this natural tree factory.
The phrase “steady encroachment of climate change” is nonsensical as climate is an abstraction defined as the difference in recorded weather patterns over multiples of time scale units equal to 30 years, and that BTW is also a completely arbitrary definition too as there is no empirical justification for it (not to mention some good arguments against it being universally applicable over the entire globe). Anyway the implications of that fact are that climate is just a concept to describe a continuous process of change, it does not encroach, it just is.
As for trees, when the weather is right, and that has cycles in my country that are 80 years long or longer, the trees, the birds and the fruit bats work together to spread seeds far and wide just at the right time for them to get the best chance of growing successfully and that is the way it has been for hundreds of millions of years, so all humans have to do is give it half a chance and not interfere, but no we have idiots who think that the wrong sorts of birds matter, just because they are pretty. Parrots and other seed eaters are actually parasites, it is the larger birds who eat whole fruit and spread the seeds that maintain the forests. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, even in ecology, and any political processes that pervert things further just do even more harm. Take virtue signalling seed spreading humans, did they even stop to study the relevant natural spatiotemporal patterns so that they could emulate them? :-|
Pretty birds just eat the seeds. Large birds eat or damage a farmer’s crop. Both aren’t really desirable in a farming community. Most people think it’s fun feeding the wildlife, and forgot why it was popular. The seed eaters also eat bugs, and by putting out seed, the family food plants are generally safe from the birds, and insects. Not many people grow their own food, and just put out food, to attract the wildlife. Unfortunately, it’s not just the birds eating the seeds. Some of the other critters enjoying the free meals, have other needs, like water and shelter to satisfy…
I think it should be fine if it is just replacing trees after a century of logging. Replanting plains that used to be forest just a few decades ago.
I have always wondered if there’s a problem with drone based planting at regular intervals, and if they should be using AI to decide the most natural ish locations.
As for everything else, this is hackaday, not sciencepaperaday. You might not believe climate change exists, but for those of us who do, encroach is a perfectly good everyday english description of what it appears to be doing, which is slowly getting worse, while affecting more and more places that previously seemed less affected.
A lot of these eco projects aren’t really “people thinking they know better than nature” or anything, they’re just people trying to undo what other people have done.
Get rid of all the new construction, cars, factories, feed lots, oil wells, and all the rest, and maybe we won’t need this stuff, but I don’t see that happening in the next few years.
Lots of people seem to go around saying that natural is better and humans are destroying everything, but it’s important to look at *what* we use to ruin everything.
It’s not high tech science, just refinements on the same clunky old analog stuff we’ve had for 70 years, but the natural is best crowd often seems to defend all the old simple stuff like gas engines, and the general way of life that accepts the current level of consumption.
“Not interfering with nature” becomes code for “Keep using the world as a trashcan, it cleans itself if you leave it alone”.
> did they even stop to study the relevant natural spatiotemporal patterns so that they could emulate them? :-|
Yes, they have. And if you assumed they don’t, you are quite perched…
For having been associated with several such bird/tree non-profits, your assumption of ignorance on their part is incredibly wrong. One of those non-profits actually had as a member a PHD scientist in this very field directly telling them the best methods/basic stuff such as these sorts of cycles. Another used outside advice from a local university. But you don’t even need this, the information about this is in fact freely available on the Internet, straight from the mouth of the scientific community.
Nobody does this for whatever bird is beautiful ( and you assuming they do shows you have made zero effort to check if your claim is correct before claiming it ), they do it to attempt to at least partially restore the ecosystem to the state it was before it was disturbed or completely destroyed by human activity. This is an important part of species preservation, and it’s something that is well understood and which many study and volunteer for.
> so all humans have to do is give it half a chance and not interfere
That might or might not be true in your home country, but this wasn’t about your home country, this was either about wherever they are using the drone to plant, or about everywhere this applies in the world.
There are plenty of ecosystems that are damaged enough that the usual natural processes either can’t do their normal job, or can’t do it well/fast enough to save other endangered species. When this happens, reforestation and animal re-implantation efforts like this do in fact help bring back ecosystems, there are thousands of examples all around the world if you just bothered to look it up instead of assuming these volunteers are acting out of ignorance and stupidity.