Drone-Based Seed Dropping and Reforestation Using Biodegradable Seed Capsules and Mycelium-Based Composites

Getting seed onto steep, degraded or hard-to-reach land is still one of the slowest parts of reforestation. Ground crews need roads, nursery seedlings and a lot of labour, and that combination breaks down quickly on hilly terrain [5]. Drones offer a way around this, and the eight papers reviewed here show it can be done in several ways: Pixhawk-controlled servo dispensers [7], [8], a low-cost Arduino-controlled dispenser [4], servo-driven gravity droppers [3], [5], a flywheel that fires seed balls into the soil [6], and a CFD-designed aerodynamic capsule [1]. A separate literature on fungal mycelium composites shows that living fungal networks can bind straw, sawdust and similar residues into light, biodegradable, mouldable materials [2]. This review reads the two streams side by side and asks whether a mycelium-based capsule could act as the protective shell of a UAV-delivered seed. None of the reviewed papers has tested such a capsule, so we present it as a research direction and not as a proven product. We list the design variables that matter most (payload, release height, wind drift, clogging, seed protection, moisture behaviour and degradation) and close with a proposed test programme for a college-level prototype.