Are Drones Coming for Tree Planting Jobs?
There have been conversations recently about whether technologies, such as Chat GPT, will replace people’s jobs in the near future. In the last few years, several companies have sprung up to explore the use of drones for planting trees and completing other tasks in the silviculture industry. Some have gained some following as well, being featured in videos such as these: Link
With more questions coming up in the industry about job security, we wanted to delve into the subject to answer the question: Are drones coming for your planting jobs?
Potential Benefits for Drone-Planting
The technology companies building these solutions say that drones offer several advantages that, at first glance, make them appealing for the tree-planting industry. First, they’re able to access areas that are difficult to reach on foot, including steep, dangerous terrains and dense vegetation. Additionally, they are capable of entering and working in dangerous environments and aren’t affected by factors such as smoke from forest fires. Drones are also cheaper to operate day-to-day than human labour, and can deploy thousands of seeds incredibly quickly compared to people.
Challenges and Limitations
Despite a few compelling reasons for drones in the industry, there are major drawbacks that will all but guarantee that drones will not be planting trees any time soon. The main limitation is that drones simply aren’t as good at planting areas that pose a challenge for seedling survival, such as the type encountered in British Columbia. People are much more accurate than drones, and the survival rate of drone-seeded land is considerably lower than those planted by humans. In addition, the required number of seeds to ensure a minimum amount of survival is massive, which would rapidly deplete our seed bank and create a shortage if implemented at scale.
Another challenge is that even though drones CAN access more dangerous or remote areas, it’s unlikely that you’d want them to. This is because people are still required for brushwork and other stand-tending services, making it useless to plant in areas that people can’t access. Because of these factors, we believe it to be unlikely that drones will be used at scale for planting, at least for the foreseeable future.
The Future of Drones in the Silviculture Industry
While we don’t believe that drones will be planting many trees any time soon, we do believe that they could play a pretty significant role in other areas of the silviculture industry at large. For example, drones could be effectively used for assessing brushwork, where their bird’s eye perspective could help determine the overall density of the target species to treat. They could also be used for aerial reconnaissance, to check the status of an area, evaluate access, and investigate safety risks such as danger trees or potentially threatening wildlife presences before sending personnel out there for the day. They would also allow you to cover more ground quickly to generate higher-accuracy information about an area before sending out a team, helping with planning and execution.
As technology continues to advance, it is essential for companies to learn how to integrate them into their processes so that the industry isn’t left behind. With that said, it’s also crucial that our applications make sense and are used to provide the best product possible for our clients. Although drones do show promise in other areas of the industry, such as brushing, surveying or recon, you can rest easy knowing that at least for the foreseeable future, drone use in silviculture will be used to aid human beings, rather than replace them altogether.
