To be fair, they got help from satellites

Sep 2, 2015 19:16 GMT  ·  By

Researchers at Yale University in the US are quite proud to announce that, with the help of satellite data, forest inventories and supercomputer technologies, they've managed to complete a census of all the trees now growing on our good old planet. 

In a report in the journal Nature, the scientists explain that their count puts the number of trees on Earth in this day and age at roughly 3.04 trillion.

Just to put things into perspective, the team says this figure translates into about 422 trees for each and every of the people now alive in the world.

The count is about 7.5 times greater than what was documented in previous studies of the kind. Nonetheless, it's not all good news, Phys Org explains.

On the contrary, this investigation reveals that, as environmentalists have been warning us for years, the fact of the matter is that our planet is losing its forests.

Thus, the Yale University specialists say that, when compared to the dawn of modern civilization, Earth's tree population has dropped by about 46%.

Deforestation is still happening in many corners of the world, and so it's safe to assume that, unless we start taking better care of Earth's patches of greenery, the globe's tree population will continue to plummet in the years to come.

The reason the Yale University research team considered it worthwhile to count all the trees now growing on Earth is that, although often overlooked, these organisms make our world tick.

“Trees are among the most prominent and critical organisms on Earth,” study leader Thomas Crowther with the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies said in an interview.

“They store huge amounts of carbon, are essential for the cycling of nutrients, for water and air quality, and for countless human services,” he added.