Yale scientist’s big new advance is to find the 2,600 billion trees humankind had not known about. Before now, 82% of the Earth’s trees were not counted, unknown, missing. This increases the tally of known trees by 7.5-fold. Phew. They reckon there are now 3.04 trillion trees, or roughly 422 trees per person.
They also estimate that humans have deforested exactly 46% of the trees on the planet in the last 12,000 years. (How fortunate that tree density estimates and satellite records are still available from 10,000 BC.) Presumably, the human deforestation factor is around 46% plus or minus 100%. Pick a number. Spin the wheel.
The idea was dumb enough to be produced by Yale and published in Nature.
Seeing the forest and the trees, all three trillion of them
A new Yale-led study estimates that there are more than 3 trillion trees on Earth, about seven and a half times more than some previous estimates. But the total number of trees has plummeted by roughly 46 percent since the start of human civilization, the study estimates.
Using a combination of satellite imagery, forest inventories, and supercomputer technologies, the international team of researchers was able to map tree populations worldwide at the square-kilometer level.
Their results, published in the journal Nature, provide the most comprehensive assessment of tree populations ever produced and offer new insights into a class of organism that helps shape most terrestrial biomes.
Next thing you know they’ll tell us to set up a global market in the carbon embedded in trees…
REFERENCE
I’m not even going to bother.