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Re:Drones that can plant 100k trees a day by samuli on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @02:03AM (#16263416)
The planting part could easily be solved by law. At least in Finland after cutting a part of forest, you'll need to re-plant it and create a maintenance plan for the forest to regrow.

The maintenance plan helps to protect the new growth to be eaten e.g. by moose and elk.

Re:Drones that can plant 100k trees a day by Jedd on Tuesday January 30, 2018 @03:02AM (#16263659)
I'm doing some regeneration work on a property in an occasionally semi-arid, very harsh region, with a combination of dry sclerophyll & cypress forest that are generally allelopathic.

This is in Eastern Australia, where we have native wombats, macropods, possums, as well as wild/feral pigs, goats, rabbits, and the occasional deer, along with parrots and fruit fly that tend to destroy fruit with potentially viable seed. But at least we don't have moose, I guess.

Fencing off an area to stop the ground-based pests has impressive observable results even after a couple of years - but it's very expensive, and fences decay within the lifetime of many of the pioneer trees.

So de jure reforestation, while a nice principle, isn't feasible in all environments.

Further complication in many areas desperately in need of reforestation is periodic drought -- Australia and the Americas have the famous El Niño / La Niña cycles to contend with, where we regularly have several consecutive years with minimal (or at best unreliable) rainfall. Again, this is an excellent candidate for a very cheap mass seed distribution system that can simply be re-run each spring until a favourable rainfall pattern produces a good result.