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IISc Bangalore scientists are doing seed bombing with drones to plant a forest
- type-2 9y agoBut flying drones is illegal in India.
- ston3r 9y agoAfaik, you can take permission from local and central authorities to do experiments. It's usually private use of high grade drones that's banned.
- sn41 9y agoThanks for this info. How do they define "high-grade"? BTW, there is a "drone festival" in Lucknow on June 19, I guess akin to the kite festivals around Sankranti. I plan to attend. http://www.hindustantimes.com/education/lucknow-to-host-first-national-drone-competition-this-month/story-qB5gi514jGXWTn23bhHUvK.html http://www.hindustantimes.com/education/lucknow-to-host-firs...
- nonamechicken 9y agoThis article has some info: https://factordaily.com/buying-a-drone-in-india/ https://factordaily.com/buying-a-drone-in-india/
- walshemj 9y agoI think the worst part of the empire for india was transplanting our civil service :-)
- samstave 9y agoWhy?
- type-2 9y agoThis has still not been updated. http://dgca.nic.in/public_notice/PN_UAS.pdf http://dgca.nic.in/public_notice/PN_UAS.pdf
- ctack 9y agoThe goat herders are going to have a field day if they sprout.
- schiffern 9y agoYep, unmanaged goat herds are a big part of the desertification problem. They can range on heavily degraded land (which is otherwise an economic signal to allow it to lie fallow). They'll eat even the remaining hardy plants down to nothing, finalizing the land's transition from forest to desert. Pretty tragic how traditional (and sustainable) herd management practices were abolished via privatization in the name of "progress." The mechanisms they used to prevent the Tragedy of the Commons were dismantled, with predictable results. http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2871076/overgrazing_and_desertification_in_the_syrian_steppe_are_the_root_causes_of_war.html http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/2871076/overg...
- ctack 9y agoIn South Africa, untethered goats are illegal, but it doesn't really help. You can see how in rural communities on the Wild Coast, the few existing forest thickets are hollowed out. There are no saplings, as soon as one emerges it is eaten. So when the current trees die the forest is gone. The effect is that you can walk through a beautiful coastal thicket knowing it's only there on borrowed time.
- schiffern 9y ago>In South Africa, untethered goats are illegal, but it doesn't really help. There's no contradiction. Proper grazing management (of all animals) is necessary, but not sufficient. There are plenty of other ways to destroy the land.
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- happy-go-lucky 9y agoAccording to the wiki at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_ball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_ball, the earliest records of aerial reforestation date back from 1930. In this period, planes were used to distribute seeds over certain inaccessible mountains in Honolulu after forest fires. This article quotes the lead professor as saying doing it with big aircraft is expensive and poses logistic problems. So the only way to do it is through drones. I respect people trying to achieve maximum output with minimal resources. > Dropping seeds instead of bombs seems like a plan that John Lennon would approve of. That sounds like a bold statement, but I’m certainly willing to approve of it :) Good job.
- shivaas 9y agohttps://www.droneseed.co/ https://www.droneseed.co/ based out of Seattle is building drones and seed cartridges specifically for reforestation.
- GrumpyNl 9y agoWe do the same in Holland ( illegal) with weed seeds.
- afeezaziz 9y agoI thought it is legal to trade weed in Holland? How is it useful to plant weed at this scale if authorities going to root it out?
- louhike 9y agoIt is legal to trade, yes, but not to cultivate it.
- fivestar 9y agoWhich, when you think about it, makes utterly no sense. They have to buy it from quasi-gangsters on the gray/black market. That puts regular shop owners in a perilous situation. Although I'm not that dramatic to realize that wholesale pot dealers in The Netherlands are probably more like regular businessmen rather than violent criminals. But still.
- akiselev 9y agoVice recently did an episode on one of the top seed producers in the Netherlands (which obviously requires cultivating it) and they seemed very professional. They were organizing month long expeditions to remote areas of the Congo in search of genetically isolated strains and lobbying governments for decriminalization as well as running bio labs. Wherever there is a black market there is much more crime, especially of the violent variety. Looking at crime in the Netherlands, I would venture to guess that its very much like California's market pre-legalization where most growers operated as legitimate, albeit heavily under-regulated, businesses that could still turn to local police in case of robbery, threats, etc. but still have to worry about flying under the radar (like when the DEA raided a bunch of collectives in California because they were too close to schools)
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- anotheryou 9y agowhere do birds fail to drop seeds? Does it need to be a denser patch of spreoutlings?
- anotheryou 9y ago~sproutlings
- nanospeck 9y agoVery surprising, I just got my drone delivered from hobbyking today and was planning to develop the exact same idea but on more dryland where the drone can water the plants until they mature.
- schiffern 9y ago> the drone can water the plants If you're in drylands you might look at land imprinting. Making shallow depressions pools all water and organic matter right next to the seeds, and allows infiltration in parched soils that otherwise run off all of the occasional rains. https://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/19/imprinting-soils-creating-instant-edge-for-large-scale-revegetation-of-barren-lands/ https://permaculturenews.org/2012/09/19/imprinting-soils-cre... http://imprinting.org/ http://imprinting.org/
- mhb 9y agoIsn't the weight of water an issue for doing that?
- caio1982 9y agoJust a small anecdote: in southern Brazil there are a bunch of protected tree species and there used to be people collectives which dropped mud seed bombs around city gardens (I don't know if they were the same kind of manure/soil India is using, but I am pretty sure they were actually semi dry mud balls to resist winters). The trick here is that protected trees cannot be cut down, never, no matter where they grow. The fee you pay if you chop one down is abdurdly high. Wherever the bombs germinate you will have permanent reforestation. I wish/hope there is something similar in India :-)
- emiliobumachar 9y agoThat's fascinating. I'd like to know more. Do you have any links? I do speak Portuguese.
- woliveirajr 9y agoSearch for the words: araucária, corte, licenciamento ambiental, árvore nativa. For ex.: http://licenciamentoambientalmunicipal.blogspot.com/2013/01/licenciamento-ambiental-de-araucaria.html http://licenciamentoambientalmunicipal.blogspot.com/2013/01/... http://licenciadorambiental.com.br/licenciamento-ambiental-de-araucaria-angustifolia/ http://licenciadorambiental.com.br/licenciamento-ambiental-d...
- forinti 9y agoIn Brazil reforestation is also used for criminal purposes. If you plant a certain kind of pine, it will, over time, completely overtake local species. In the course of a decade or two, you can transform protected areas into whatever you wish.
- canttestthis 9y agoSandalwood and a few others are protected across India. Growing sandalwood without a permit was recently legalized in India, but cutting it is still illegal. Though it mainly grows in the south of India (not sure if its because of climate or happenstance). Other states occasionally maintain their own smaller lists of protected trees.
- overcast 9y agoJust a little anecdote for the US. Obviously for other countries, like India, this is more of an issue. But it looks like we've made it sustainable here for a long time. https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/more-trees-than-there-were-100-years-ago-its-true https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stori... In the United States, which contains 8 percent of the world's forests, there are more trees than there were 100 years ago. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), "Forest growth nationally has exceeded harvest since the 1940s. By 1997, forest growth exceeded harvest by 42 percent and the volume of forest growth was 380 percent greater than it had been in 1920." The greatest gains have been seen on the East Coast (with average volumes of wood per acre almost doubling since the '50s) which was the area most heavily logged by European settlers beginning in the 1600s, soon after their arrival.
- taneq 9y agoIt's awesome that there are so many trees, but don't discount the part about old growth forests. Many replanted 'forests' (at least in Australia) are monocultures of fast growing softwoods, and not remotely comparable with old growth forest.
- bluGill 9y agoIt isn't necessarily awesome that the US has so many trees. Forests can get overcrowded which is bad for the forest overall even though there are a lot of trees. It isn't just quantity that is important it is the whole ecosystem, those trees that are overcrowded shade out helpful plants on the lower forest floor. Forests in the US generally depend on regular forest fires for health. The US has mostly been putting out those fires and the result is we have a lot more trees than is ideal.
- snerbles 9y agoWhich is where we come in the loop, logging for wood instead of burning. It's when we suppress fires and don't thin the forest that there's dangerous fuel accumulation.
- Pxtl 9y agoI'm kind of surprised, actually. I mean, if there's one country with access to cheap labour, it's India.
- kumarvvr 9y agoYou don't have enough funding here to pay labour to go around and plant seeds. This is a cheaper and better alternative.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago> This is a cheaper and better alternative Flying a drone in India require permits from multriple authorities [1] Their import is also highly regulated [2]. It may be cheaper to throw a couple bucks at a few thousand people than go through the license Raj. At the very least, it would be faster and more predictable. [1] http://m.hindustantimes.com/india/us-citizen-arrested-for-photographing-khajuraho-temples-with-drone/story-uPMYnJdhcG5Y8Edh2ar2xO.html http://m.hindustantimes.com/india/us-citizen-arrested-for-ph... [2] http://mashable.com/2016/03/02/india-drones-duties/#ib1XDcXpNuqC http://mashable.com/2016/03/02/india-drones-duties/#ib1XDcXp...
- naravara 9y ago>It may be cheaper to throw a couple bucks at a few thousand people than go through the license Raj. At the very least, it would be faster and more predictable. They're just going to trample over the landscape they're supposed to be foresting. You also can't verify and trust them to actually go out there and plant things rather than just throwing their whole bag in the nearest trash can and coming back with an empty sack demanding payment.
- jerf 9y ago"They're just going to trample over the landscape they're supposed to be foresting." Really? Do you have a mental image of these people locking arms like a search party and marching around the forest deliberately stomping everything they find into a thin green paste or something? It is not actually that difficult for some people to walk into a forest without killing everything they see, plant some trees, and come back. The Evil of Man (TM) does not actually extend to laser beams of death coming out his eyes and striking down all living things within visual range. I can't help but read this as just being contrarian for the sake of contrarianness, because this objection (being raised by some others in this discussion too) is fundamentally deeply silly.
- fivestar 9y agoIs there anything drones can't do? All mine seems to do is get stuck in trees.
- kumarvvr 9y agoDuring long train journeys in our childhood, we had people telling us to drop seeds along railway tracks after eating fruits and other stuff. Guess we have gone hi-tech now. Seems like a good way to automatically forest large swathes of un-populated land.
- HarryHirsch 9y agoThis is probably the thread where you mention the beaver re-introduction program in Idaho: http://time.com/4084997/-/ http://time.com/4084997/-/
- 24gttghh 9y ago> “It’s a dry area, so our interest is to bring back the rains. That seems...very optimistic.
- bluGill 9y agoMaybe, maybe not. Trees release moisture into the air (their roots gather this moisture from deep in the ground) which condenses into rain. So long as you get enough water from outside trees will increase the recycling of that water in the local area resulting in more rainfall than no trees. This only works in specific situations though. I don't know if applies to the climate in India.
- schiffern 9y agoIt's not as crazy as it sounds. About 80% of continental rainfall is caused by trees recycling fallen rain water in the soil back up into the atmosphere. http://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983 http://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983 Obviously the specifics of the implementation depends on local geography and hydrology, but re-planting trees is pretty much the only economically/thermodynamically plausible way to "bring back rains" (eg desalination is way too expensive). So yeah, they're actually onto something.
- vermontdevil 9y agoNew England made a dramatic recovery in forest. I saw pics of old New England (Vermont) and it was basically barren. That shocked me as if you visit now, it's basically covered with trees. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/31/new-england-sees-return-forests-and-wildlife/lJRxacvGcHeQDmtZt09WvN/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/31/new-england-see...
- chheplo 9y agoJust a small anecdote: Coming from generations of farmer family and gardener myself, this experiment feels like a "Cloudy with a chance of seeds" for rodents and squirrels.
- spraak 9y agoThe picture of the seed bags in the article is captioned > The drone-dropped seeds wrapped in balls of manure and soil which I imagine would mitigate against rodents etc.?
- ktta 9y ago@dang why was the post title edited? It said 'IISc Bangalore Scientists experimenting with drone seed-bombing to plant a forest'. I see no problem with it, other than IISc not being as well known as say MIT. But it is still a very good institution and I think they deserve to be known. The name of the institution should be celebrated for their research, not just put behind a large banner of 'Indian Scientists' which gives no recognition to the institution. Just like MIT/Stanford scientists aren't called American scientists every time some article about research comes out from that University. If someone doesn't know what IISc is, we know they can just google it.
- frozenport 9y agoWorld ranking is about 200
- ktta 9y agoOverall ranking is 190 (I assume you're looking at this[1]). Ranking by subject, it is at 51 in many subjects. That's because Indian Institutions tend to neglect fields other than mainstream Tech/Science because that's all they can get funding for. Still, if their ranking is at 190, why shouldn't they be called by their name? [1]: https://www.topuniversities.com/universities/indian-institute-science-iisc-bangalore https://www.topuniversities.com/universities/indian-institut...
- frozenport 9y agoI hate to be mean but there is a reason why the school isn't named, and it was a rational decision by the editor. Internationally, nobody has heard of them outside of India because unlike Stanford and MIT they have yet produce any technologies of value. While American universities live on patents, Indian schools are know for suppling large US software companies with cheap labour - often below market value. Importantly you'd be hard pressed to find somebody that can tell them apart. Indian "scientists" has a better connotations than the specific school, whose reputations are unknown or second rate - this immediately questions the rigour and relevance of their work.
- Mz 9y agoIt’s a dry area, so our interest is to bring back the rains. http://permaculture-and-sanity.com/pcarticles/trees-and-the-water-cycle.php http://permaculture-and-sanity.com/pcarticles/trees-and-the-... It isn't inevitable that more people equals more destruction. We can act as stewards responsible for the environment.
- problems 9y agoWhat's with the fake Apple-style message talking about allowing notifications? Seems sketchy.
- Maskawanian 9y agoIt is a dark pattern, you hit allow twice so that you can't hit block and they can't pester you any more. It is like the similar dark pattern for phone ratings. "How do you like this app?" you get some stars, if you vote anything less than 4 or 5 it doesn't redirect to the phones market for review.