One region, 400 billion trees

The Guardian:

The new findings, published in the journal Science, provide the first estimates of the abundance, frequency and distribution of many thousands of Amazonian trees. Extrapolating the data, compiled over 10 years, suggests that greater Amazonia harbours around 390 billion individual trees, including Brazil nut, chocolate and acai berry.

The area covered encompasses the Amazon Basin (including parts of Brazil, Peru, Columbia) and the Guiana Shield (Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana), spanning an area roughly the size of the 48 North American states. In total roughly 16,000 tree species are believed to exist in the Amazon, but half the total number of trees are thought to belong to just 227 species.

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