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I very much doubt many of these seeds will be successful.

They say that it's more efficient to use a drone than to manually plant a tree or seed. Yes, blasting seeds out of a potato cannon would also be much more efficient if the goal is to spread unsuccessful seeds. If the goal is to get to a mature tree or forest, then I doubt it's more efficient at all.

Forrests are self-sustaining. But recreating a clear-cut forrest usually requires a bit more care than just chucking seeds around.

Yeah, I also doubt their claims. Spreading seeds from the air you're basically spreading bird food.

Successful trees need the seeds to be planted under the earth.

Lockheed Martin had a plan to make baby tree missiles to be dropped from the sky [1] and they'll embed themselves nicely into the earth thanks to the terminal velocity energy.

Trouble is, they'll also probably kill all animals in the forest they happen to impale on their way down.

[1] https://www.sunnyskyz.com/blog/1467/Planes-Can-Plant-1-Billi...

I mean, they at least claim that solving this problem constitutes the actual secret sauce of their project:

> "The niche really lies in our biotech, which is the support system for the seed once it's on the ground," says Walker.

“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."

No idea how credible this is of course.

I don’t know about a forest, but seed bombing is something that guerrilla gardners have used to reintroduce native plants back into blighted urban areas.

Reforestation projects that I have heard work well, works with ecological succession. Once clear cut, if grass gets into there, then that’s more difficult because soil ecology has changed to favor grasses.

But dumping a bunch of mulch will favor forest soil and favorable conditions for a forest. Mulch from cut trees usually go to the landfill, with arborists having to pay for it.

More fundamental ways are changing the way water flows through a system. Water just needs to be slowed down enough to accumulate organic materials. This video is about how the Arizona canal inadvertently created a water-harvesting structure that kicked off native wild growth along the bearm: https://youtu.be/jf8usAesJvo

A company I've done work for has an 80 percent germination rate by shooting seedballs into the dirt.

They later return to the site via GPS data to monitor and verify their success.

https://dronedj.com/2022/01/07/airseed-technologies-works-to...

Have you researched at all or are you just dismissing the entirety of their work? Did you know they plan for an efficacy rate and over-seed? There's no downside. They've thought about all of this before.
I think that's why the Seattle company Droneseed is focusing on more established saplings: https://droneseed.com/
> I very much doubt many of these seeds will be successful.

Isn't that the entire point of using a ton of seeds? It's cheap and you only need N of them to sprout, so you just try to plant as many as you need to reach N viable ones. Seems like a weird way to dismiss the approach.

If there are chipmunks or squirrels the job is done on arrival. Those little guys are outrageously industrious at burying excess seeds and nuts, everywhere they can. I'll betcha order Rodentia is responsible for planting many times more trees than Primates. We should bioengineer them for our future teraforming jobs.
Likewise I doubt it.

I had a friend who was doing tree planting during the summers back in the college days. They were planting tree saplings, and even then many did not survive. It’s a numbers game. However, this is a difficult and expensive solution.

If they can spread lots of seeds on the cheap and get results then more power to them!

It’s fine if they’re not, trees produce ridiculous numbers of seeds per individual and if only a few are successful nature will take care of the rest.

The problem is that monoculture forests aren’t actually all that great, better than nothing but not that great either.

How were the first forests made?
I volunteer with a local organization that plants native trees (mostly Oak varieties) in the area.

Over the years they have developed a pretty elaborate system for planting saplings to maximize their odds of taking root and maturing into grown trees.

The process involves digging the right sized hole, placing a fertilizer packet at the bottom, repacking the dirt around the plant, protecting the sapling from deer and rodents using a chicken wire fence and a tall translucent plastic tube that’s supported by a steel rebar driven into the dirt. Then building a small berm around to capture water and covering it with mulch. They claim these steps increase odds of survival to 95%+.

Point being that it might take more than shooting seeds into the ground to regrow a forest.

What happens to the tube and wire? Do these need to be cut away later to allow the tree to grow beyond a sapling?
I hate those plastic tubes. Nobody ever removes them and they just end up littering the countryside.

There's a wood near me where someone has collected them all into an enormous grotesque pile. Very creepy.

Interesting anecdote. Do you have photos?

(Bonus points for a photo with arrows that explain the parts.)

Like others doubting the claims, it's worth noting the thoughts by professor Forrest Fleischman about "Silicon Valley businesspeople who are entranced with the idea of tree planting as a climate solution": https://twitter.com/ForrestFleisch1/status/14440088233506037... (2021)

If you dig around on SER https://www.ser.org/ you can find documentation on previous failed restoration efforts - my understanding is these efforts really need an intersection of community involvement/stakeholdership and education.

To give some benefit to organizations trying this, airseed does have a FAQ if you scroll down a bit on https://airseedtech.com/what-we-do/ . Curious about their differentiator mentioned in the article:

""The niche really lies in our biotech, which is the support system for the seed once it's on the ground," says Walker.

“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.""

Of topic, but the guy has an interestingly apt name given his job, until you look up the meaning of his surname. I believe Fleischman translates to butcher, so he's "Forrest Butcher", which makes it wholly inappropriate given his job!
It seems with the abundance of cheap money since 2008, Silicon Valley has become very good at just convincing investors to hand them money
https://youtu.be/UsvrkVU0Qpw?t=99

"What's extremely special about this seed pod is that is carries over a gram of carbon [...] putting it back into the ground."

After that statement, all credibility is lost.

Surely they’re just badly explaining that it has a bit of “potting soil” to give it a better chance to grow.
"Drones" "artificial intelligence" "start-up"

Sounds like a scheme to scam money out of government grants, bloated charities/aid agencies and/or VCs. I’m surprised blockchain isn’t (yet?) involved.

Is there any evidence that throwing seeds at the ground is the bottleneck in fighting deforestation as opposed to for example the lack of suitable land to plant these in where the trees would actually be viable?

As another commenter points out, if seed distribution is the only bottleneck in fighting deforestation then a potato cannon will work just as well and will probably come out cheaper (and more fun!), but then you wouldn't become CEO of a "tech for good", AI-drone startup.

I’d like to invite you to invest in my startup. We’ve got hundreds of strains of trees that will self plant millions of trees each year.
> The company has already planted more than 50,000 trees

That does sound a lot, but I am not sure how they can justify their expected rate:

> Each of our drones can plant over 40,000 seed pods per day

Their long term goal is in line with the second, not the first:

> and aims to plant a total of 100 million by the year 2024.

Well, they only need 3 drones then... 3 * 40k * 365 * 2.5 ~ 1e8

…assuming a 100% germination rate.
I was interested in how many of the trees they've found to be viable, but since they've only planted 50,000 and the drones plant 40,000 a day, they've only been working for 1.25 days so presumably they have no idea.
One of the ways the elites are generating carbon credits for pennies on the credit.
They’re calling them “carbon offsets” now, to avoid future legal issues.
I don't know if it's elites who are doing it, but greenwashing is a serious concern. We are too trusting that people claiming to restore the environment are "good" and can therefore be trusted to take a truly effective approach, rather than merely playing a game to maximize profit like a typical capitalist.
Planting trees the proper way isn't exactly costly in the first place (e.g. compared to the complete lifecycle cost of maintaining and many decades later eventually harvesting a tree - the planting is a trivial cost). It's a weird problem to tackle, well, since it isn't really a problem.
They probably read the article “planting a trillion trees would solve climate change”
Extremely strange to see this writeup with no mention at all of Droneseed, which has been doing this successfully for a few years now, engineered seed pods and all. I've written them up twice, if you're curious or skeptical about the one in TFA:

https://techcrunch.com/2018/11/26/that-night-a-forest-flew-d...

https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/droneseeds-36m-a-round-mak...

hmm .. "drones fighting the war on deforestation" ..

what about Arbor Day ? seed science.. good soil conditions.. erosion control.. regenerative bio-dynamic ecosystomology ?

can the point-and-shoot gaming crowd please chime in on how we can blend the marketing message here, since perhaps we share some goals?

There's a big difference between tossing a seed on the ground and planting a tree.
Presumably these seeds are encased in a clay like substrate with nutrients, insecticides, capsaicin, mycology cultures, moisture retention, etc.

Pretty sure they aren't just dumping bags of seeds on the ground.

A popular seed firing drone you might have heard of before is the PineCone™ - it’s fully autonomous, and deploys during periods of disturbance to maximize effectiveness. I think it might do a better job than this.
Trees left to themselves will each fire off millions of seeds. The idea that humans know best than nature is why we get into the mess that we get into.

Trees have everything within them to spread themselves.

What's the key thing is people leaving the land alone, (e.g. industrialists, urban planners and farmers) and that's something that is very very hard to do. If we can leave the land alone for nature then we can start to do simple conservation efforts to give nature a helping hand. Drones aren't that.

Is the problem of deforestation an issue with seed distribution?
I once read an article where a flying stake was used as an airborne delivery mechanism to plant these very expensive and hard-to-procure tree seeds.

I do do believe that to be a useful delivery mechanism for that type of seeds.

This method effectively deals with going underground, securing constant moisture, and protection against birds and other critters.

Too bad that I haven’t seen any followup to that approach.

Technology would do little good if humans don't care about the local ecosystem at all. This repeats again and again and seems we won't learn. Having people living on the ground who are interested in long term local sustainability, not motivated to exploit the land, is usually the best option.
It’s all fun and games until the drone battery overheats and starts a forest fire.
Trees are detremental to grassland ecosystems and don't contribute enough to carbon sequestration (assuming that is the goal) as grasslands do.
This article is clickbait and lacking in real detail.

> The company has already planted more than 50,000 trees

They also say, "Each of our drones can plant over 40,000 seed pods per day“ - so putting these numbers together, does this mean they’ve so far done <2 days of work?
theres a fantastic study on over forestation and the effects on the climate model. generally mass disruption either way has significant impacts. Plant X get Y is a incredibly reductive model for conceptualizing forestation.