When thinking of the effects of climate change, global warming, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, and extreme weather patterns are often the first things that come to mind. One area that may be overlooked is deforestation, or the loss of forests, around the world. Recently, however, scientists are urging just how important forests are to the planet's climate.

Wildfires are a major cause of deforestation - since 2010, nearly 130 million trees have died in California alone, mostly because of drought and wildfire. Humans are also directly responsible for forest loss because of things like agricultural clearing and logging for timber. Once forests are lost, is it possible to rebuild them? Maybe, thanks to a new startup, Biocarbon Engineering, which is using drones to plant trees on a large scale. But let's back up for a second to really understand and appreciate why rebuilding forests is so important.

Quanta Magazine shares an enlightening article detailing just how powerful of a role forests play in the planet's climate. Through the use of powerful computer models, scientists have confirmed that vegetation can control weather patterns across huge distances. This means that deforestation can have an impact on another continent's climate. The article states:

"Plants are actually powerful change agents on the planet’s surface. They pump water from the ground through their tissues to the air, and they move carbon in the opposite direction, from air to tissue to ground. All the while, leaves split water, harvest and manipulate solar energy, and stitch together hydrogen, oxygen and carbon to produce sugars and starches — the sources of virtually all food for Earth’s life.

The key features of this molecular wizardry are pores, called stomata, in plant leaves. A single leaf can contain more than 1 million of these specialized structures. Stomata are essentially microscopic mouths that simultaneously take in carbon dioxide from the air and let out water. As Swann notes, the gas exchange from each stoma — and indeed from each leaf — is, on its own, tiny. But with billions of stomata acting in concert, a single tree can evaporate hundreds of liters of water per day — enough to fill several bathtubs. The world’s major forests, which contain hundreds of billions of trees, can move water on almost inconceivably large scales. Antonio Nobre, a climate scientist at Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, has estimated, for example, that the Amazon rainforest discharges around 20 trillion liters of water per day — roughly 17 percent more than even the mighty Amazon River."

As you can see, forests can be powerful, which is why it's an exciting prospect that Biocarbon Engineering is using drones to plant trees at a much quicker rate than humans ever could. With two operators and ten drones, they estimate that up to 400,000 trees can be planted in a single day. That's astonishing. The startup is working with Worldview International Foundation and together, they are helping local people get higher-paid and more technical jobs. Read the article published on Fast Company for more details about the process and the interesting work they are doing around the world.