Can a robot help slow the pace of climate change? Two college students named Marta Bernardino and Sebastião Mendonça believe the answer is yes. The friends have created Trovador, a robot that plants new trees in areas where fires have burned down forests. 

Bernardino and Mendonça have a special connection to forests. They grew up playing in the woods near their homes in Portugal, a nation in Europe. But since 1980, wildfires have destroyed more than a million acres of Portugal’s forests. This is because climate change has led to hotter, dryer weather in the area. Both heat and dry air can lead to more fires. 

Experts say it’s important to restore forests because trees can help reduce the effects of climate change. Tree shade helps keep the planet cool. Plus, trees help clean the air by trapping harmful carbon and giving off healthful oxygen. 

Bernardino and Mendonça were still in high school when they built the first version of Trovador. Like other inventors, they kept building new versions, each one better than the last. Trovador looks like a spider, only it has six “legs.” 

Using those legs, the lightweight robot can easily move up and down Portugal’s steep slopes—something humans struggle to do. Even the first version of Trovador could plant trees 28 percent faster than a human. The newest one can plant up to 200 saplings, or baby trees, per hour!

“We build all-terrain robots that carry baby trees on their backs and plant them [without help] across difficult [landscapes],” Bernardino and Mendonça told Smithsonian Magazine.

Bernardino and Mendonça plan to keep improving Trovador. They hope to make the robot easy to use and cheap to build so that it can be used in forests in their backyard and beyond.