| Authors | Ersson |
| Paper (PDF) | View paper |
| Category | Nursery & Establishment › Remote sensing & mapping |
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The EcoPlanter is a mechanised tree-planting system developed by the Swedish company Bracke Forest, designed to integrate site preparation and seedling planting into a single, highly efficient machine pass across prepared or cutover forestry terrain. Mounted on a compatible base machine — typically a purpose-built forestry carrier or a converted forwarder — the EcoPlanter uses a rotating planting head that simultaneously mounds or scalps a microsite, doses it with fertiliser or gel-based root zone treatment if required, and inserts a containerised seedling from an onboard magazine into the prepared position, covering and firming the root plug in a single operational sequence. The system is designed to handle standard containerised seedlings produced in plug trays, and its onboard seedling storage and automated feeding mechanism allows a single operator to plant at rates that substantially exceed manual gang planting under comparable conditions — with productive rates of several hundred to over a thousand seedlings per hour achievable in favourable terrain and stand conditions. EcoPlanter technology addresses a persistent operational challenge in plantation forestry: the combination of labour shortage, physical demands, and seasonal weather windows that constrain manual planting programmes. In Australia, where plantation restocking after clearfell harvesting must occur promptly to maintain rotation schedules and carbon accounting obligations, mechanised planting systems such as the EcoPlanter offer a means to reduce dependence on seasonal planting crews, lower per-seedling establishment costs, and improve planting quality consistency. The system has been most extensively deployed in Scandinavian conifer plantations but is attracting growing interest from Australian pine plantation managers as containerised eucalypt and pine seedling production technology matures to meet the specifications required by mechanised handling systems.
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Company | Ersson |
| Type | Paper |
| Year | 2015 |
| FWPA RD&E | 4.4 |