Russia is world leader of trees, 20% of planet's vegetation are ours

The "lungs" of our planet consist of about 3 trillion trees, and 20% of them are in the territory of Russia. That is a record-breaking figure (640 billion), which is double the number of trees in Canada, that ranked second.

Photo: Source: Pravda.Ru photo archive

Thomas Crowther, a postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies analyzed with his colleagues satellite images of tree populations with the help of supercomputer technologies. They managed to count up the exact number of trees on Earth, and found out that their quantity has reduced about 46% since the first signs of civilization.

According to Crowther, trees "store huge amounts of carbon, are essential for the cycling of nutrients, for water and air quality, and for countless human services. Yet you ask people to estimate, within an order of magnitude, how many trees there are and they don't know where to begin. I don't know what I would have guessed, but I was certainly surprised to find that we were talking about trillions."

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