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Writer's pictureSimon Golstein

Drones and trees - from giant sequoias to seedlings

The largest tree in the world is named General Sherman. It’s a giant sequoia located in the Giant Forest in northern California, standing at 84 meters tall and with a volume of almost 1,500 . The tree is also more than two thousand years old. 



Today we understand the importance of these living monuments, which can live for up to three thousand years and which have been around since the Jurassic period. But since 2015, 40 giant sequoias have died due to bark beetle infestation. General Sherman needed to be checked for this condition, so in May 2024, teams from the US National Park Service and Giant Sequoia Lands Coalition made use of a drone to aid in mapping General Sherman. The drone scanned the entirety of the tree with a LiDAR scanner and HD camera, providing vital data for the team to analyze.


Usually, the sheer size of giant sequoias makes checkups laborious tasks requiring an entire team of experts, hundreds of feet of climbing rope, and around a week of work. The drone enabled them to do the job in a fraction of the time and gathered more accurate data for analysis.  


Giant sequoia General Sherman. Credit: Ken Lund, flickr


This capability is very important going forward because researchers do not yet understand why bark beetles, which did not appear to threaten these trees in the past, are now killing them. They theorize that it may be due to rising temperatures, but further investigation is needed, and drones make these investigations much easier to execute. 


Checking the health of giant trees is not the only way that drones help trees - they are becoming a powerful tool in replenishing forests around the world. 


The planet is losing trees at an alarming rate due to factors such as logging, invasive insects, wildfires, droughts, and changing climates. As a result, many countries are devoting considerable resources to replanting - and drones can plant trees at rates exponentially higher than can be achieved by land. 


In Myanmar in 2018 for example, researchers used drones to fire mangrove ‘seed missiles’ to help reforestation, and discovered the following year that the replanting had been successful; the saplings had grown by an average of 20 inches. The researchers in this case estimated that just two drone pilots could plant 400,000 seeds a day with this method, a rate almost twenty times greater than had ever been managed previously. This success has been echoed in the US and Australia too, with several projects in both countries planting seedlings over thousands of hectares. 


Drones aren’t just an advantage in the sheer numbers of trees that they can plant, but also enable us to plant in areas difficult to access by land. Furthermore, they increase the efficiency of the process by allowing us to map areas to plan reseeding efforts, reducing wasted seeds, and by monitoring and maintaining the health of replanted forests. 


When it comes to wildfires, which destroyed approximately nine million hectares of tree cover in 2023 alone, we find another area where drones are useful. Projects in the UK and Germany are researching autonomous drone swarms to detect and extinguish fires. Enormous swathes of land can be monitored autonomously with drone patrols, which can send alerts when a fire is detected, enabling teams to put it out before it spreads too far. Furthermore, the presence of drones can deter people from starting fires on purpose.


Specially equipped drones can even extinguishing the fires themselves. And in California, the forestry service often uses drones to shoot self-igniting plastic spheres, known colloquially as 'dragon eggs', to start controlled burns that stop wildfires in their tracks.  


OAS team preparing for controlled burn. Credit: U.S. Forest Service, flickr


To call trees important to our planet would be an understatement - it’s estimated that more than 80 percent of land mammals, birds, insects and plants live in forests, and around one-third of human beings directly depend on forests and their products. They stabilize climates, prevent soil erosion, and replenish the air that we breathe. At the same time, it's estimated that the planet's forest cover has dropped by 46% since the dawn of humans. Now, thanks to drones, we have a way to effectively repair this damage by replenishing and protecting the world's forests for future generations.


High Lander's Orion DFM is a powerful solution for the end-to-end management of drone fleets and pilot teams. Features including multiple simultaneous flight management, autonomous patrols, BVLOS missions, payload control and AI-powered object detection give the platform the versatility to execute any kind of mission, from security to deliveries to conservation. For more information about the power of Orion, get in touch for a free consultation.

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