Counting the trees.
by Chris, 19 November, 2015, 2 comments
How many trees are there in the world? Four hundred billion was the figure often quoted; that is, until this month when a report in Nature has come up with a figure slightly in excess of three trillion. This approximates to 420 trees for each person on the plant.
How was this figures arrived at ? Well, the team (an impressive array of scientists from Universities and research institutions all over the world) amassed data from national forest inventories, plus peer reviewed studies where forests and woodlands had been studied in detail; this information was then used to inform what was also being seen on satellite imagery. For the purposes of the study a tree was defined as "a plant with a woody stems larger than 10 cm at breast height". Read more...
