Loss of forest cover in regions like the Amazon is creating major problems for mankind. Tropical rainforests support more than 1,000 trees per hectare. These trees ‘breathe in’ the carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere and convert it into Oxygen (O2) and Carbon (C) which they store in the form of wood. This vital photosynthetic process has been described as being the equivalent of ‘the lungs of the planet’. With an area of trees greater than the size of Belgium destroyed each year, the amount of CO2 that can be captured, converted and stored (CCS or sequestered) from the atmosphere is reduced proportionally. This results in more CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere and in turn makes global warming problems worse. Reversing the upward accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere requires mass reforestation.

‘Every year more than 7.3 million hectares of forest are lost through logging and slash and burn land clearance activities’

C-Questor’s Phytolabs technology is developing protocols for addressing the need for rapid reforestation by supplementing traditional reproductive techniques with continuous fermentation of cloned tree cell suspension cultures. The start-up material for the mass replication of the trees is provided by a Cytobank which is then aseptically inoculated into a specially designed Treepak container mounted on a roboticised, Robotree assembly line. Whilst CQ’s novel techniques allow for the production of hundreds of millions of trees annually the problem of actually planting such large quantities of trees in remote areas with poor infrastructures has to be tackled, and to do this C-Questor is developing an aerial delivery platform called Treedrop.

Silvicultural Technical Overview
Trees are one of the great natural carbon sequesterers, collectively storing a huge amount of carbon as both wood and soil carbon (leaves and roots). Presently, around 20% of global CO2 emissions arise from disturbance / deforestation arising from human activities. By Silviculture, and good forest management, using a wide variety of commercially useful trees, it is possible to maintain and restore existing forests, and to plant new ones, by which a significant amount of net CO2 emissions can be avoided.

‘An important consideration for land owners is the major increase in land values that can result using C-Questor’s portfolio of reforestation techniques’

Such good practices have hugely beneficial effects; in as much as they promote biodiversity, and maintain the habitats on which biodiversity depend. A large proportion of prescription medicines were first discovered in wild plants, and many new medicines are undoubtedly still out there waiting to be discovered. By preserving bio-diverse forests, we maintain the possibility of discovering these substances which we could not do if the plants that produce them are destroyed. As well as bio-diversity, and the chance of new medicines, trees help regulate and purify water supplies, mitigating drought and flood, and provide many useful materials.

The Silviculture sector aims to produce and plant huge numbers of trees using a range of proprietary technologies, so enabling the creation of bio-diverse multispecies tree plantations. These technologies include robotic tissue culture for the mass production of tree seedlings, and a technology for mass plantation of said seedlings from the air in remote locations. Much of the income from these plantations will be derived from the carbon trading markets, with the promise of longer term revenues from wood, and other forest products as the forest matures.

In many cases, our tree plantations will be inter-planted with a variety of local shade loving crops – so giving the opportunity of agricultural revenues to local people within the forest. These technologies will of course be applicable to other trees and plants such as fruit trees, and ornamental trees and shrubs, so that once developed, the technologies will have the possibility of generating significant additional revenue in the high value Western gardening markets.