Aerial Seed Bombing
हिंदी में पढ़े : एरियल सीड बॉम्बिंग
Being environmentalist from heart, I try to contribute as much as I can to reduce my environmental
footprint. Apart from individual contribution the globalization has tipped the
scale of demand and supply. In the past decade we have seen acceleration in
world wide environmental issues like Global Warming, Glacier Melting, Weather
Cycle Change, Ozone Depletion, Increase in Green House Gases. Our future looks
quite dim. Somebody rightly said that
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| Seed Bombs |
And the
way we are going we don't have much time left before these problems become
irreversible.
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| Pixabay: Deforestation |
I was reading about the upcoming technologies which have some
promising results to counter these issues and one such fairly old technique is
aerial seed bombing.
Aerial Seed Bombing as name suggest is aerial reforestation
technique in which a land is reforested through an air craft by disposing the
seeds in air. This technique can be dated back to 1930 where aircrafts were
used to distributes the seeds aerially over the inaccessible landscapes like
mountains and hilly areas Honolulu, when the forest was burnt in fire.
But the term "seed grenade" came much later which was
first coined by Liz Christy in 1973. She designed the first seed grenades from
balloons filled with tomato seeds, and fertilizer.
Other major geographical region where Aerial Seed Bombing can be
used are large open lands where there is reach for planes to disperse the seeds
in barren or grassy areas.
Now a days the seed bombs are made out of bio
degradable material which is used as a container. These containers contains the
seeds and the resources for seeds to grow in it.
Currently, with cutting edge technology Aerial Reforestation is
done through the use of planes to drop these containers with saplings.
As quoted by Peter Simmons, who conceived the idea that
"Equipment we developed for precision planting of fields of
landmines can be adapted easily for planting trees. There are 2,500 C-130
transport aircraft in 70 countries, so the delivery system for planting forests
is widely available – mostly mothballed in military hangers waiting for someone
to hire them. The possibilities are amazing. We can fly at 1,000ft at 130 knots
planting more than 3,000 cones a minute in a pattern across the landscape –
just as we did with landmines, but in this case each cone contains a sapling.
That’s 125,000 trees for each sortie and 900,000 trees in a day.
With Alamaro’s canisters, a large aircraft could drop up to
100,000 saplings in a single flight, ultimately leading to nearly one million
trees per day.
Thailand has already made plans to begin with a five-year pilot
project that utilizes the aerial reforestation method to boost forest
regeneration for forests that have deteriorated."
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The major advantage of this technology is that it can be adopted
at large scale level where thousands of these bombs can be dropped in a region
and with time the seeds sprouts and the outer shell bio degrade in the soil
giving firm support system to the sprout. An experienced forester can
seed/plant may be 50 to 100 seeds a day where as this technique can disperse
the seed on scale of thousands with good chance of fertilization. It is said
that a plane can seed bomb An Entire Forest of 900,000 Trees A Day!
The only factor in my opinion is the cost effectiveness and the funds. For initiative this big governments across the globe have to come together and work on it as a global movement. We are in desperate need of such steps. I hope that one day our combined effort can make our future generations proud and our planet more green!
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