Environmental Science · Environmental Engineering
Researchers tested an autonomous drone system that drops biochar-coated native seed balls at planned locations. In a representative 27-waypoint mission in Northern Thailand, 24 drops were confirmed by both the drone and ground observations, while a controlled test found 95% of drops landed within 0.66 metres of their targets.
Europe’s forests lost an estimated 6.5 ± 0.8 petagrams of aboveground biomass between 1985 and 2023, with annual losses accelerating after 2018. Harvests caused most of the total loss, while rising natural disturbances in biomass-rich temperate forests helped drive the recent increase.
A study in Scientific Reports describes an AI framework that generates different residential landscape layouts while explicitly weighing trade-offs among comfort, appearance, accessibility, and ecological value. Tested on three parcels in Changsha, China, the approach produced more diverse, realistic-looking morphologies and found optimized schemes that, on average, scored 6.2% above professional human benchmarks on a combined index.
