Forestry engineers have mastered the job of harvesting commercial forests efficiently, but replanting those forests or establishing new ones is still largely people-powered, using a spade and a bag of seedlings. Using drones to deliver seed packages may change all that and become a standard tool in the forester’s toolkit, alleviating the perennial shortage of labour for the back-breaking job of manually planting trees in often difficult and remote terrain.

Using drones to plant seeds could help to cool the planet by rapidly establishing new forests, replanting timber-harvested areas, reseeding in fire-devastated zones more quickly, and accessing difficult-to-reach areas. Several young start-ups have developed drones to rapidly plant seeds from the sky, many claiming headline-grabbing promises to plant a billion trees or more in the next decade, which has not hurt their ability to raise capital.

On paper, there’s no doubt that drones can get the job done...