Imagine a helicopter flying over a swamp and dropping down a wooden pallet with soil, a baby tree, and four shrubs on it, like a tiny floating forest. In 2023, that is what happened in Washington state. In a conference abstract presented at the 2025 meeting of the National Association of Wetland Managers , Michelle Bahnick of the Tulalip Tribes described how her team used a helicopter to drop in 90 pallets of pre-planted vegetation into a wetland too dangerous and wet for crews to walk into. The goal was simple: to give native plants a fighting chance against a persistent invasive grass that has been choking Pacific Northwest wetlands for decades.
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