Guru ENT Signs Agreement With Pyeongchang Forest Station, Forestry Cooperatives on Slope Revegetation Trial

Guru ENT (㈜구루이엔티), an ecological restoration technology company, said on Aug. 11 that it had signed a three-way agreement with the Pyeongchang National Forest Station, the Korea Forest Service office that manages state-owned forest in Pyeongchang, and the Eastern Forest Project Division of the National Forestry Cooperatives Federation to stabilise and revegetate forest-road slopes and to apply machine-based revegetation technology in the field.

Under the agreement, Guru ENT will use its G-PAD excavator-mounted revegetation equipment and its Pelote revegetation method at the Pyeongchang forest road project site. G-PAD is mounted on an excavator and prepares a seedbed on the slope face. After the seedbed is prepared, Guru ENT applies a biochar-based sowing material using domestic seed, and on sections that equipment and workers cannot reach it will also sow by drone.

The Pelote method is a slope revegetation technology developed by Guru ENT and certified through the Technology Market programme for small and medium-sized enterprises. In this project the company will combine the Pelote method with mechanised construction techniques based on G-PAD-equipped excavators and powered spreaders, and verify how the combination performs on an actual forest road site.

Under the agreement Guru ENT is responsible for applying G-PAD and the Pelote method and for technical support. The Pyeongchang National Forest Station will oversee the project and monitor results, and the Eastern Forest Project Division of the National Forestry Cooperatives Federation will manage construction on site.

After the field application, Guru ENT plans to use a multispectral drone to analyse vegetation indices in the test and control plots and to monitor how the vegetation establishes itself, in order to assess whether the approach can be used more widely.

"This agreement matters because G-PAD and the Pelote method are being applied to an actual public forest road project," said Shim Jae-yong, chief executive of Guru ENT. "We will combine mechanised construction with biochar-based revegetation technology and develop it into a revegetation method suited to forest-road slopes."