If the drone is slow, say 50mph, they still need to throw 7 plants per second.
I was a timber in the Australian outback (as a backpacker) and if you plant trees more than 10 feet apart, the sun burns them up, even with a tropical climate/wet season alternance. Like, pitch black wood. You need them close to each other and minimum 5 rows together if you want a self-sustaining hedge (and still the outer rows are doomed to die early). And I'm talking about heavily irrigated areas [1] next to the Argyle lake in the Northern Territory [2].
I guess not all places are like Australia, but those with desertification and ecosystem deprecation will require many trees at once. I wonder how they'll deal with this minimum critical mass problem. Overall this startup idea is excellent, for example thick hedges for areas next to the Sahara can stop the desert from advancing and revive the whole area within the perimeter, by rehydrating the winds and restoring livable temperature.
I would be sceptical about using this to stop desertification. The plants still need to be protected from livestock and kept watered. This doesn't solve the underlying causes of vegetation loss that created the problem in the first place.
>I would be sceptical about using this to stop desertification.
Take a closer look at the Permaculture movement and the extremely effective science developed around that scene on the subject of stopping desertification - where this article specifically mentions trees being dropped from the sky, that's merely the outer limit. Grassland-dropping drones would also be effective - its not just trees-as-species, but all the other bio-sphere in between that matters.
Farmers using drones to drop mantis-packs is another potential use .. the sky is literally the limit. What we don't have, is the drone systems that can be readily deployable.
50mph is quite fast. The competition is about 3mph, so 10mph would already be a 3-fold improvement. So: shoot 1 per second, or have a shotgun approach, or simply have more than 1 pass per drone, or multiple drones...
I was a timber in the Australian outback (as a backpacker) and if you plant trees more than 10 feet apart, the sun burns them up, even with a tropical climate/wet season alternance. Like, pitch black wood. You need them close to each other and minimum 5 rows together if you want a self-sustaining hedge (and still the outer rows are doomed to die early). And I'm talking about heavily irrigated areas [1] next to the Argyle lake in the Northern Territory [2].
I guess not all places are like Australia, but those with desertification and ecosystem deprecation will require many trees at once. I wonder how they'll deal with this minimum critical mass problem. Overall this startup idea is excellent, for example thick hedges for areas next to the Sahara can stop the desert from advancing and revive the whole area within the perimeter, by rehydrating the winds and restoring livable temperature.
[1] Heavily irriguated area above 38C all year long: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sandelholzplantagen_Kununu... [2] The whole page, with climate histograms: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kununurra,_Western_Australia