Tag: Environmental Restoration

Earth Day Project 2021: An Autonomous Seed Planting Drone for Environmental Restoration

Back in 2014 I had just graduated from my environmental science degree and was eager to start a career in the environmental sector. I had more ideas than time back then, which is obvious from the notes that I was keeping. Fast forward to 2020, I had just completed my masters in sustainability studies, am looking for work, and there is a province wide lockdown. Despite languishing for most of the year, I figured with the time that the lockdown afforded me, I could try to create something epic. I dusted off my old notebooks, and decided this project was worth my time.

It has become increasingly clear that conservation is no longer enough when it comes to our current biodiversity crisis. We need active environmental restoration to solve the problems we are facing as a society. I wanted to create a tool that could scale to produce results for huge environmental restoration projects and be accessible for people and organizations for a reasonable cost.

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For the past 4 months I’ve put in hundreds of hours to produce the Aspen. Its a fully autonomous drone capable of quickly broadcasting seed across large areas. The broadcasting wheel is interchangeable allowing users to spread up to 2.5kg of various seed types including treated tree seed, tallgrass, wildflower, clover and anything else you can imagine! (Edit: The Hopper in the video is a small one for testing) The drone is controlled by a base station that uploads a flight plan to the drone. Once the drone is ready, it takes off and completes the flight plan fully autonomously, spreading seed as it goes. The base station is capable of controlling multiple drones simultaneously, opening up possibilities for multiple drones to work in tandem to cover a huge area for restoration projects.

Broadcasting seed is never going to replace planting trees directly, but there are several methods for treating seed to increase their success rate that I have been researching. The University of Alberta has created an interesting seed coating that seems to increase the success rate of tree seeds to as high as 70%. This is definitely something that I would like to experiment with, as it may also assist with even broadcasting of the seed.

There’s still testing to carry out, and some refining to complete the design, but it is a working prototype ready to be put to the test. Please watch the video and let me know what you think! If you or your organization would like to work together to test the drone out on your project or a portion of your project, please let me know and I’m sure we can come up with an arrangement!

Also, if you or your organization are looking for a talented employee capable of making huge projects like this a reality, please reach out and lets have a conversation!

Bonus FAQ: I don’t understand, but several people have all asked “how high does it go?” Lets just say, I’m not going to test it out, but in theory it could ascend at 2m/s for 20 minutes. That works out to about 2.4km in altitude. At that point it would crash to the ground, probably never to be seen again.

2021-04-21 Add Comment

What Might a Nature Based Recovery Look Like in the Kawarthas?

In 2020 the coronavirus devastated economies, put millions of people out of work, all at a time of global climate and ecological crisis. 2020 was also the year we entered into the UN’s Decade on Restoration that aims to “prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide”. No matter where you sit on the political spectrum, you can agree that one way or another, we are in a time of crisis. A term that has been tossed around over the past year as a way out of the crisis is “a nature based recovery”.

Nature based recoveries are not a new idea, we can look to the past for models on what it might look like, putting millions of people to work while restoring our natural environments. One of the most ambitious conservation projects of all time was the Civilian Conservation Corps. Over the course of the program it employed nearly 3 million Americans while planting over 3,000,000,000 (Billion!) trees. A version of this program has been resurrected by the incoming Biden administration and is expected to present a plan within the next several months. It will be exciting to see it take shape over the coming years.

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Closer to home, we can look to similar projects that helped employ masses of Canadians while enhancing our natural environment. Following the Guelph Conference and the subsequent establishment of the Ganaraska Region Conservation Authority there was a resolution to seek any practical project that would employ civilians in the post war era. The Ganaraska region had become a dustbowl due to the high rates of erosion caused by rampant deforestation and the underlying sandy soils easily being swept away by wind or rain. Restoring the Ganaraska Watershed seemed like an obvious candidate for the project. Over the next several years the Ganaraska Authority reforested over 10,000 acres of land while employing thousands of unemployed Canadians.

The benefits of these programs have extended far into the future. Today the Ganaraska watershed is a popular outdoor tourism destination, and is no longer subject to the destructive flooding it once was. Indeed, a University of Oregon study found that for every million dollars invested in watershed restoration it resulted in 16 new or sustained jobs and up to 2.5 million dollars in total economic activitiy. There are very few public sector investments that have rates of return that scale in a similar fashion.

Locally, what might a project of this scale look like that could employ many people while creating enormous ecological benefit? One such project that comes to mind is the Kawarthas Naturally Connected. The KNC is a natural heritage system plan developed over the past decade that aims to provide a linked network of conservation corridors across the Kawarthas. Perhaps a project that restores a ecological corridor from the Oak Ridges Moraine or Rice Lake in the south to the Kawartha Lakes in the north could be a great starting point? As an added benefit, perhaps a multi-day hiking trail could follow the corridor similar to the way the Ontario Waterfront Trail is used as a platform for restoring coastal ecosystems along the great lakes shoreline.

History has demonstrated that these environmental projects can have an enormous environmental and social benefit, hopefully our recovery can help lead to a sustainable future for everyone. The Kawarthas is a leader in environmental expertise and stewardship, if anyone can accomplish a nature based recovery, it is us! In 2016, the UN designated Peterborough a Regional Centre of Expertise for sustainability, lets put that designation to use and carry out a decade of restoration.

2021-02-25 Add Comment