Santa Cruz Cabrália, Bahia, Brazil – With a loud buzz, the drone takes flight. Minutes later, the hum gives way to a distinctive roar as the machine, hovering some 20 meters above the ground, begins to discharge its precious cargo and a cocktail of seeds falls to the earth below.
Over time, these seeds will grow into trees, and eventually a thriving forest is expected to remain where there was once only sparse vegetation.
That’s what awaits the startup that operates this drone, a large contraption that looks a little like a Pokémon ball with antennas.
The 54 hectares (133 acres) that have been severely degraded by agriculture and livestock in the Brazilian state of Bahia are just the beginning. Franco-Brazilian company Morfo has set a goal of restoring one million hectares of degraded land in Brazil by 2030, using seeding drones and a rigorously researched preparation and monitoring process.
How big is the deforestation problem?
Deforestation is a rapidly growing problem in many countries. In Brazil, for example, deforestation in the Amazon destroyed an area larger than Spain between 2000 and 2018, showed a study by the Amazon Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information Network (RAISG) in 2020. Although preliminary data from the government’s spatial research institute ( INPE) shows that deforestation in the Amazon fell by 50% last year, forest loss continues to increase in other biomes, such as the Cerrado.
In Afghanistan, years of war and fighting have had a devastating effect on forests. Many were completely destroyed. According to the research group World Rainforests, more than a third of Afghanistan’s forests were destroyed between 1990 and 2005. In 2013, this number increased by half due to the additional problem of illegal logging.
And in Colombia, internal violence and displacement have pushed armed groups, farmers and cattle ranchers into the forests, causing more deforestation. In 2016 alone, after a peace agreement was rejected by some armed groups, deforestation increased by 44%. Since then, President Gustavo Petro has overseen a decrease in forest loss, by up to 49% by 2023, according to Global Forest Watch, but deforestation has increased in other Amazon countries such as Bolivia.
Wildfires in many parts of the world, notably in Australia, California and across the Mediterranean in recent years, have also contributed to deforestation. Most recently, thousands of people were evacuated last week due to wildfires in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada.
Why is forest restoration important?
“Climate change is happening, temperatures are rising, it is already too late. So we need to plant [trees] now”, says Adrien Pages, co-founder and CEO of Morfo.
Healthy forests are a critical resource in the fight against climate change; they provide valuable ecosystem services such as carbon storage, temperature regulation, water resources and biodiversity conservation. Almost one billion people They depend on forests for their subsistence, according to the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).
Simply conserving the remaining forests is insufficient, so the United Nations has urged countries to fulfill their pledges to restore one billion hectares of degraded land by 2030 to avoid large-scale ecosystem collapse.
But this is a difficult task. Brazil, for example, has promised to reforest 12 million hectares by the end of this decade – a goal that requires planting an area the size of England, or eight billion treesaccording to ((o))eco, a Brazilian environmental journalism platform.
How can drone technology help?
Traditional reforestation, where seedlings are grown in a nursery and then planted manually, is effective, but requires a lot of work and time. Drones can help speed up the process and reach areas that are dangerous or inaccessible to humans.
Morfo uses two drones adapted to transport 10kg to 30kg of seeds and can sow up to 50 hectares per day, piloted automatically or manually depending on the terrain. The height at which the drone flies and the density and type of seeds it disperses depend on a sowing plan, drawn up after examining the environmental conditions of the land.
“For us, it’s not about the drone. The most important thing is the preparation and the seeds,” says Pages.
Using data from drone and satellite images, as well as information gathered by a team on the ground, data scientists use computer vision – a form of artificial intelligence – to develop models that can recognize trees and seed species. They are used to automate the creation of an optimal propagation strategy and to monitor the results.
“The scalability of the solution is what is important to us. The initial costs of the project will be high, to allow for diagnosis, research and adequate preparation, but after that, the costs per hectare are relatively low and fall as the area grows”, says Pages.
What types of seeds are used?
“Seed availability is one of the biggest concerns. And the seed survival rate is low, so you need to have a lot of seeds,” says Mikey Mohan, founder of ecoresolve, a US-based ecosystem restoration company.
Morfo is working to resolve this. She developed a biodegradable pod to sow smaller, more fragile seeds, with an 80% survival rate in the laboratory. The project in southern Bahia, a region where the Atlantic Forest began to be deforested for agriculture centuries ago and which is now invaded by monocultures of eucalyptus and sugar cane, is a testing ground for different sowing methods to discover the best way to cultivate native species.
It is also investigating the resistance of these species to climate change to ensure that the trees planted here will be standing 100 years from now, without the need for human intervention.
Overall, the Atlantic Forest, a biome that stretches along Brazil’s densely populated coast, has lost more than 88% of its original tree cover, according to the NGO SOS Mata Atlântica.
“Our goal is to restore a functional ecosystem. The idea is to evaluate which species are most efficient and optimize the quantity of seeds we use”, explains Morfo’s scientific director, Emira Cherif.
Sowing non-native cover crops first – low-growing vegetation such as legumes that protect the soil and provide other benefits such as nitrogen fixation in the soil – can increase the germination rate of pioneering native species.
Purchasing seeds is one of the ways companies like Morfo are including local communities in their restoration efforts. “Collecting seeds is a good way to value people, create lasting green jobs and protect a growing forest,” says Pages.
Last year, Morfo worked with 1,000 seed collectors across Brazil, like Crispim Barbosa de Jesus, a 51-year-old subsistence farmer who began supplementing his income by collecting seeds after taking a course offered by a local NGO.
Barbosa, who in his youth worked felling trees to extract charcoal, sees the forest in a new light since becoming a seed collector. “Nature is so beautiful, you see the resistance of the trees. I feel better when I’m in the forest,” he states, adding that “collecting seeds is work that uplifts people.” He currently leads a team of seven mostly young men – including two of his sons – to provide native seeds to a handful of clients, including Morfo.
Where else are drones being used to reseed forests?
A small but growing number of companies around the world are using drones for ecosystem restoration. A peer reviewed article co-authored with Mohan, in 2021, identified 10 such companies, many of them partnering with NGOs and helping to restore areas affected by wildfires in Australia and North America.
In Brazil, small-scale nascent projects are mainly concentrated on private land. Morfo has a new partnership with municipal authorities in Rio de Janeiro, but the 500 hectares (1,236 acres) it has planted for other clients so far – in the Amazon and Atlantic Forest – are all private land that has been degraded by mining or agriculture .
How effective is the new drone propagation?
The novelty of this reforestation method means there is little conclusive data on the long-term results of seeding drones. However, a year after the Morfo experiment began in Bahia, preliminary signs are promising.
“Bahia went through a big heat wave at the end of 2023. It was very dry, but you can see that our plants are doing very well thanks to the [the cover plants],” says Cherif, whose team of researchers spent a week in April measuring and cataloging every seedling that has germinated since sowing last year.
Collecting this type of data is essential to expanding the use of drones, according to Mohan. “To use drones on a larger scale, we need more research to understand the [seed] survival rate and how it can be increased,” he says. “You want to make sure that everything you plant can actually grow into a tree.”
This story originally appeared on Aljazeera.com read the full story
