Drones to Fight Climate Change with Large-Scale Aerial Seeding

By Lot Amorós, Spain Flying Labs

Our planet is currently losing 10 billion trees a year. Climate change is spawning devastating wildfires scorching thousands of hectares of forests worldwide. That, combined with the alarming rate of deforestation, we’re losing 18.7 million acres of forests annually. 

With sowing drones and coated seeds, we can accelerate the ecosystem restoration at large scale and low cost. Stopping deforestation and restoring damaged forests could provide at least 30 percent of the climate solution.

Spain Flying Labs and Dronecoria created an open-source drone platform to perform these seed-based aerial restorations. We are offering this technology to the rest of the world through a crowdfunding campaign that will support an investigation into the best seed coating formulas for drone deployment.

With the power of digital fabrication, the design of the drone frame could be downloaded from any place of the world and built in any laboratory of the fablabs network. This distributed construction, and the fact that it is open-source, empowers the global south for being independent of any manufacturer, and able to repair (and learn) by themselves. Previous experience is necessary to build it, but after completing a construction workshop, any environmental organization could potentially use our drones to boost reforestation in local ecological restoration projects. 

Since drones can cover a hectare in only 5 minutes, one flying team could cover one hundred hectares per day. The challenge here is to gather the right forestry and pilot professionals around each country to start reforestation projects that could be economically sustainable for each organization.

There is insufficient public information about seed coating, so the project mission aims to create an open-source science repository around this promising technology, to learn what is the best coating to drop by aerial devices, like multi-rotors.

Thanks to an international collaboration between Flying Labs, one of the crowdfunding campaign goals is to give Kenya Flying Labs a sowing drone to perform a pilot project in Kenya.

Do you want to start a reforestation pilot project in your country? Visit the campaign and speak with us!