X-FOREST: An Open-Source Drone–Rhizosphere Architecture for Accelerated Reforestation and Soil Regeneration

Severe wildfires in 2024–2025 left over 4 million hectares of Mediterranean and boreal forests in a degraded state. Conventional hand-planting methods restore at a rate of ≤1 ha day⁻¹ per team and cost upwards of €3,000 ha⁻¹. This paper presents X-FOREST, an open-hardware platform that couples autonomous dew-harvesting drones with a subterranean sensor-actuator root-mesh (rhizosphere network). The system is designed to hydrate and seed target plots without external pumps, utilizing commodity components at an estimated cost of ≈$390 per node. A 5×5 meter proof-of-concept plot near Haifa, Israel, collected an average of 3.2 L night⁻¹ of dew, achieved an 86% germination rate for acacia-biochar pellets, and demonstrated a 71% reduction in labor hours relative to manually managed plots. All schematics, firmware, and datasets are released under CERN-OHL-S v2 and GPL v3 licenses to encourage community-driven development and replication.