Tropical forests are dying. Seed-slinging drones can save them
A storm that has been lurking all morning finally breaks as Win Maung steps off his puttering motor launch into ankle-deep mud that gives off a heavy stink of ammonia. It is August 2018, the middle of the monsoon season, and under the downpour, the silver-grey channels of Myanmar’s coastal wetlands fade into a murk of spray and low mist. On the bankside, spindly mangroves dip their roots into water.
When Win Maung, head of mangrove restoration projects at the Worldview International Foundation (WIF), a Norwegian nonprofit, first came to this stretch of Myanmar’s Ayeyarwady coastline in the 1990s, the area was still thickly forested. “The trees were so big I couldn’t get my arms around them,” he says. “Now…” he gestures at the sparse tree cover. There is barely a single trunk more than ten centimetres in diameter.