A new study shows that there are more trees in the world than previously estimated. A group of 38 scientists has recently released their study to the journal Nature and found that there are approximately 3.04 trillion trees in the world, yes that's a trillion! And this is eight times the previous estimate of 400 billion. This means that there are 422 trees for each person on Earth.
To arrive at this number, the researchers used a combination of satellite imagery and ground-based measurements from around the world. A postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental study Thoman Crowther said that "the previous information that we had about the global forest system all came from satellite images...we're using all this information to provide more detailed understanding of what's going on below the surface [of the canopy]."
The team made the first globally comprehensive map that was generated using more than 400,000 forest plots in more than 50 countries around the world. According to the co-director of Ucross High Plains Stewardship Initiative Henry Glick, the information was gathered through various sources such as Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the National Forest Inventory and other peer-reviewed studies.
"The diverse array of data available today allowed us to build predictive models to estimate the number of trees at each location around the globe," as stated by Glick, second author of the study.
This is indeed a great news. However, the study further revealed that the number of trees since the start of human civilization tumbled down to approximately 46%.
In an interview with The Guardian, lead author Crowther said, "I didn't expect human activity to come out as the strongest control on tree density across all of the biomes [habitat types]... It was one of the dominant regulators of the number of trees in almost all of the world. It really highlights how big an impact humans are having on the Earth at a global scale."
This should, therefore, alert us as trees are a very critical component to our everyday lives. Hence, now is the best time to exert some effort to save the trees.
Dr. Thomas Crowther reminded that "we've nearly halved the number of trees on the planet, and we've seen the impacts on climate and human health as a result... This study highlights how much more effort is needed if we are to restore healthy forests worldwide."
