Wildfires are consuming our forests and grasslands faster than we can replace them. It’s a vicious cycle of destruction and inadequate restoration rooted, so to speak, in decades of neglect of the institutions and technologies needed to keep these environments healthy.

DroneSeed is a Seattle-based startup that aims to combat this growing problem with a modern toolkit that scales: drones, artificial intelligence and biological engineering. And it’s even more complicated than it sounds.

The beautiful part of this kind of wind-driven aerial re-seeding program is that the seeding and growing patterns are going to be far more natural than is currently the case in on-the-ground re-seeding, where logged or burned forests are unnaturally seeded and planted in almost grid-like rows and columns. To read more, click here.