Earth “evergreen” but not enough 442 trees per inhabitant – Intelligonews

442 trees for every inhabitant of the Earth. Not 61 as previously believed.

In short, our planet is inhabited by more trees than previously believed and make it known

is the census published in the magazine Natur ee conducted by an international collaboration that includes groups of 15 countries , led by the American College of Yale . 3,040,000,000,000, or 3.04 billion, this would be the number of trees present on Earth today. A huge figure, some (previous estimates stopped at about 400 billion), but almost halved over the last 11 thousand years after the deforestation caused by human activities.

So far, the estimates were based on terrestrial vegetation is mainly on data from satellites, but they could not reach a degree of precision that can suggest the numerical reports. The census conducted in the US indicates that, for the most part (about 1.3 trillion), the trees are located in the tropics and subtropics.

There are also 74 million billion trees that populate the boreal regions and 61 trillion in temperate zones.

More importantly perhaps, the results of the study will necessary for planning of future action in defense of the forests, and projects that aim to counteract the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. According to the analysis published in Nature , every year about 15 billion trees are cut down by man , of which only five billion are replaced by new plants. Numbers that make you think, as he explained to the BBC Henry Glick , one of the authors of the study. “There seems to be an insignificant percentage, and should lead us to consider carefully the role that deforestation is having on ecosystems,” said the researcher. “ As the loss of trees is mainly due to timber harvesting and conversion of land to agriculture, the numbers are likely to increase with human population growth expected over the next decades.”