Digital Tree-Planting Operations

Robotics, blockchain, and mobile applications are digital technologies developed to boost tree-planting activities and tackle environmental degradation. These digital practices also often offer carbon-offset services to individuals, companies, and investors, while structuring new green markets that promise to transform restoration agreements into local actions.

At the same time, these technologies raise questions about how the restoration of ecosystems can create meaningful local livelihood opportunities and the distribution of benefits.

iPlantForest

iPlantForest proposes to use blockchain operations to track and report where and how restoration actions occur. Users around the world will be able to purchase tree-planting services through a cryptocurrency token named ReforestCoin. The platform promises to develop a transparent system through databases that monitor and report how restoration projects progress at the local level. iPlantForest is made up of several companies, including Mahogany Roraima which is developing the forest bot.

Screenshot of the iPlantforest’s code of conduct. Image source: iPlantforest. Retrieved 24 June 2022, from https://iplantforest.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Code-of-Conduct-iPlantForest-2020.pdf

Forest Bot

Graphic rendering of the Real Carbon Capture Machine (RCCM), an automated tree planting machine. Image source: Mahogany Roraima [image]. Retrieved 27 July 2022, from https://mahoganyroraima.com.br/real-carbon-capture-machine/

The Forest Bots are autonomous robotic machines designed by the Brazilian company Mahogany Roraima that undertake forest management practices without human interference. The Real Carbon Capture Machine (RCCM) currently in development aims towards a self-driving system with GPS guidance, automated processes of planting, watering, fertilising, and monitoring, AI and 3D-imaging for forest inventory and analysis and recording of all actions in a cloud-based database accessible to partners and investors. Since 2016, the company has been investing in prototypes that aim to plant 100 hectares of forest in only 4 hours. The current prototype forest planting machine is tractor-operated and has the theoretical capacity to plant approximately 3,600 seedlings or 12 hectares per hour.

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