It Turns Out Earth Has Seven Times as Many Trees as Previously Thought

Have you ever wondered how many trees there are on Planet Earth? Well, an international group of researchers have discovered that Earth is home to just over three trillion of them—that's a lot more than the current global estimate of 400 billion.

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers describe using a combination of satellite imaging, boots on the ground tree-counting, and forest inventories to gather their data. What makes their study new is that instead of just charting where the world's forests are located, they've specifically found out how dense they are.

"Here, we use 429,775 ground-sourced measurements of tree density from every continent on Earth except Antarctica to generate a global map of forest trees," they write in their paper.

According to a Nature YouTube video, some of the densest areas are in the subarctic forests, where, "you can find a tree every square meter."

The video adds that almost half of the trees on Earth are found growing in the tropical and subtropical forests. Aside from revealing the astonishing number of trees on Earth, the data gathered will also help researchers and conservationists alike understand "where endangered species live, how water is cycled in an ecosystem, how much carbon dioxide is being absorbed from the atmosphere." This will help make their restoration of natural habits more targeted and accurate.

"The number of trees in a given area can also be a meaningful metric to guide forest management practices and inform decision-making in public and non-governmental sectors," write the researchers in their paper.

While three trillion trees sounds like a lot, the researchers point that the figures are hardly a cause for celebration. In the YouTube video, we're told that before the birth of human civilizations thousands of years ago, there were twice as many trees as there are now, with "most of Europe" like "one big forest."

Furthermore, though there are currently 422 trees per person on Earth as opposed to 61 trees per person as previously thought, we're losing trees at a rate of 1.4 trees per person every single year. According to the researchers' paper, roughly 15 billion trees are lost annually owing to deforestation.

With another study publishing the loss of 45 million acres of tree cover last year, now might just be the time to take note of the three trillion trees we need to be safeguarding for the future.