Reforestation
Below are a series of previous and ongoing collaborations in the field of reforestation. In both of these collaborations, the goal has been to produce biodegradable housings that protect developing tree plantlets, each with their own specific use case and utility. To learn more about each, please read further or send an email for more information.
SeedCrown - the Green SeedCrown
2024 - ongoing
What if growing longleaf pine or other keystone trees were as easy as sticking a seed in the ground and watching it grow? Nature did it that way for millennia with great success but man’s efforts to regenerate longleaf and ecologically important plants have often proved frustratingly difficult. Consequently, the riddle of how to get from a seed in a tree at one location to reliably having a seedling growing in another with the least amount of work in between has remained unanswered. Searching for easier ways, Scott Laceter has developed a precision direct seeding method and associated device called a Seed Crown™ that has achieved seed-to-surviving-seedling rates at the one-year mark exceeding 60% for longleaf seeds planted straight into the forest ground, with average rates for thousands of seeds across dozens of test plots greater than 25%. Currently, they are being made either out of poly lactic acid (PLA) and polyproelene (PP) mixed with wheat straw.
While Seed Crowns™ can be made from a wide range of materials. However, the optimal solution would combine low costs, non-toxicity, a certain degree of durability, and the trait of melting or burning in a prescribed fire without adding material heat. If a material could ring the forgoing bells and also genuinely biodegrade even without fire, all the better.
To achieve this, we are continuously working towards empl0ying CelluWood, to produce a burnable, non-toxic, mechanically rigid, and biostimulating Green Seed Crown™.
Landlife Company - Shuttle
2020-2021
Landlife Company turns planting into a precise science. Using innovations like the Cocoon, smart-coated seeds, automated planting vehicles, and more, Landlife seeks to enable growth, quality, speed and scale to restore degraded lands.
Developed over a year long collaboartion with the head of R&D at Landlife Company, Harrie Lovenstein, we explored dozens of designs, design features, and separation methodologies towards the final, injection molded Shuttle. It is a revolutionary planting guard with coated dormant seeds that speeds up reforestation projects and brings the nursery directly to the field. Click their video, or learn more with the button below.
