FLASH FOREST

The International Panel on Climate Change suggests that the world must reforest and afforest one billion hectares of forested land; today, there is a net loss of seven billion trees each year. Flash Forest is a tech start-up in Ontario that seeks to disrupt the tree planting industry by using automated technology, specifically aerial mapping software, drone technology, pneumatics, automation and ecological science to reforest timber forests that have been harvested, as well as areas that have been affected by wildfires. Flash Forest seeks to plant trees at 10 times the rate of a human laborer using a bag of seeds and shovel, at 20% of the cost of traditional tree planting techniques. Flash Forest is motivated by the automation of the timber industry to create efficient harvesting technologies. The Flash Forest methodology creates land use surveys that map out planting locations that can sustain 2,000 trees per hectare, assuming that each of these planted trees will sequester 40 parts of carbon dioxide annually, mitigating the effects of climate change. The technology that Flash Forest is developing suggests that they will be able to plant 100,000 seed pods per day using a single drone, with a series of ongoing pilot tests that have plants over 2,000 seed pods to date. The project was started as a Kickstarter campaign by Canadian scientists and engineers, and aims to plant one billion trees, with 150,000 trees planted by the end of 2020. 2019 - present
60 acres
1004 feet above sea level