There are more trees on earth than stars in our galaxy. NASA believes there could be anywhere from 100 billion to 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. But the number of trees around the world is much higher: 3.04 trillion! Scientists calculated what’s called “tree wealth” based on estimates of the number of trees in every country in the world in relation to factors like the country’s physical size and population. The world’s overall tree leader is Russia with 642 billion trees, followed by Canada (318 billion) and Brazil (302 billion). There are roughly 422 trees for every human on earth.
The total is “astonishing,” study co-author Thomas Crowther, who did the research as a postdoctoral student at Yale University, told reporters. When Crowther asked forestry experts to predict the total, they made wildly incorrect guesses, he said in a separate interview. “No one could comprehend the scale of the things we were seeing.”
In a more sobering find, Crowther and his team calculated that roughly 15.3 billion trees are cut down each year, and humanity has reduced the Earth’s tree population by nearly half since civilization began. Around the world, one of the biggest influences on the number of trees is the corps of humans wielding chainsaws and axes.
The scientists didn’t have to count the world’s trees one by one. But they still needed two years, data amassed by thousands of tree huggers and a good chunk of supercomputer time to add up all those oaks and palms and pines. The team combined actual tree counts made in wooded areas, around the world, with satellite pictures. By counting actual trees and comparing them to satellite pictures, they learned how to predict the number of trees in places where satellite views were the only source of information. The result is the first full-coverage map of the entire planet’s tree density and one of the very few estimates that sees the trees and not just the forest.
Credit : USA Today
Picture Credit : Google
