Quebec lost about 4.5 million hectares of forest to fire in 2023, more than the area of Switzerland. Three years on, the dead trunks are still standing, and drones are flying between them, shooting seed pods into the soil.
The drones belong to Flash Forest, a Toronto company founded in 2019 by Bryce Jones, Cameron Jones and Angelique Ahlstrom. We first wrote about drone reseeding in 2022, when it was mostly an idea. It’s working at scale now.
A tree in a capsule
Each pod is biodegradable and packed with nutrients, moisture-holding additives and mycorrhizal fungi, which help young roots pull food from the soil. Burned ground is rough on a seedling, so the pod carries a bit of healthy forest floor with it.
The pods are made to exact sizes so the drones can load them automatically. The seed sprouts right where the tree will grow. No nursery, no transplant shock, and no heavy machines churning up land that crews can barely reach on foot.
Thirty below
After the fires, northern Quebec ran short of native seed. So Flash Forest and its partners went out in winter by snowmobile, climbed jack pines, and picked cones by hand at temperatures down to -30°C. They came back with about 8.5 million seeds, all packed into pods within five months!
The work is a partnership with the Oujé-Bougoumou Cree First Nation, whose hunting grounds burned in 2023. Benny Blacksmith of Oujé-Bougoumou has described how even the small animals vanished afterward, leaving the larger ones without food. Planting from the air lets the land heal without being torn up again. The community hopes white birch and black spruce come back too.
Fire’s old job
Jack pine is made for fire. Its cones can stay sealed until heat opens them, so a burn usually plants the next forest. Hotter, more severe fires can break that cycle. Hence people in parkas, up in frozen trees, doing what the flames used to.
(Fire has odd allies. Australia’s firehawks spread it on purpose.)
The slow part
Planting takes seconds. Growing takes decades. Flash Forest surveys each site, then returns to count seedlings, comparing its pods with bare seed and with land left alone. Some Quebec sites sprouted late after a warm, dry spell, and the team is rechecking them this fall.
In 2025 the company planted 686,147 trees on 429 hectares of burned forest, and it counts more than 3.3 million trees to date. What kind of forest those become, we’ll find out in a few decades.
Images courtesy of Flash Forest, except where noted. Via designboom.
