INALÅHAN, Guam — The drone’s propellers whirred to life, blurring as they picked up speed and filling the air with a mechanical buzzing. Within seconds, the large buglike contraption was rising high above a largely barren stretch of red clay soil — one of many that run like scars through the rolling hills in the southern part of the island.

As the operator maneuvered the machine through the sky with a handheld controller, dozens of small dirt-colored balls spewed out of a hopper attached to the bottom of the drone and rained down onto the landscape below. Each clod — ranging in size from roughly the diameter of a dime to a quarter — was packed with seeds.

Researchers and armies of volunteers have tried to restore the Pacific island’s historically lush landscapes. Without as much of its original vegetation, the exposed soil gets eroded by heavy rains, turning rivers and streams red with sediment that can contaminate drinking water sources and smother coral reefs downstream.

But it can take several hours of hiking to reach some of the eroded areas. Meanwhile, with climate change, the island is getting hit by more extreme storms, including Super Typhoon Mawar in May, one of the worst typhoons to slam the island in decades.

“We’ve been planting thousands and thousands of trees,” said Austin Shelton, who oversees a project called Guam Restoration of Watersheds. “It’s still like putting a Band-Aid on one hole on your shower head.”

Drones, he hopes, will help give his team a leg up.

From the western United States to Australia, land managers are starting to deploy drones to drop seeds over areas devastated by wildfires and floods, or left barren by logging and other human activities.

The planet lost 4.1 million hectares of tropical primary forest in 2022, or the equivalent of 11 soccer fields of forest per minute, according to the World Resources Institute.

While aerial seeding probably won’t replace other reforestation methods, some experts say the technology could improve access to mountainous terrain and rapidly disperse many more seeds than planting by hand. One company, for instance, says its drones can seed up to 60 hectares a day.

With its diverse terrain, Guam could be an ideal place to test the promise of this method.

“We will take care of Guam,” said Shelton, director of the University of Guam Center for Island Sustainability and Sea Grant. “Then, once we have the technology ready, we’ll be able to share it with all of our island neighbors who have similar watershed issues that we do.”