There are still 9,000 species of trees to be discovered on Earth

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An international project led by researchers from the University of Bologna has put the number of tree species that currently exist on Earth at 73,300. And 9,000 of them are yet to be discovered. The census is the result of a three-year effort, the first large-scale estimate of global forest biodiversity. The conclusions are published this Monday in the latest issue of the

magazine . The authors point out that the richness of terrestrial ecosystems is greater than previously estimated and, at the same time, point out that it is extremely vulnerable to changes caused by human beings (deforestation, loss of biodiversity and climate crisis).

"Until now, data for many large areas of the planet has been very limited, based on ground observation and lists of known species and their distribution by area; these same limitations prevented a global perspective on the subject," he explains. Roberto Cazzolla Gatti, professor at the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences at the University of Bologna and first author of the study. "A broad knowledge of the richness and diversity of trees is essential to preserve the stability and functionality of ecosystems."

But at the same time the authors stress that achieving a global perspective is complicated for a number of reasons: funding, logistics, field research or taxonomic debates are just some of the variables that come into play. To overcome these obstacles, the researchers began by amassing the largest database ever on forest tree species, a mapping operation that identified approximately 40 million trees belonging to 64,000 known species. It involved 150 scientists from around the world and was carried out within the framework of the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative (GFBI).

Based on these preliminary results, the scientists performed statistical analyzes using

(FACAI) at Purdue University in Indiana (USA). Once the calculations were completed, the researchers established that total number of more than 73,000 tree species, 14% more than those currently known.

"Taking a census of the global number of species is like a puzzle with pieces scattered around the world,"

says Professor Jingjing Liang, coordinator of the GFBI at Purdue and co-author of the article.

"At the GFBI we have solved it as a team, sharing each of the pieces, we have combined the individual data sets, coming from the people who do the field work - people who go to the forest stands and measure each tree -, in a huge global data set.

Amazon and the Andes

So, according to these results, there are still 9,000 unknown species, a third of which would be rare species with a reduced population, both in number and in area. The authors believe that a large part of these undiscovered species (40%) could be in South America, more specifically in the two main types of landscape of the subcontinent: "grasslands, savannahs and thickets" and "tropical and subtropical forests" of the Amazon and the Andes.

"To obtain a reliable estimate of biodiversity, we must pay attention to the number of rare species that are currently known, those that have appeared once, twice or three times in field samplings", analyzes Cazzolla Gatti.

"Most of the species that appear in the samples are quite common, there are some rare and only a few unknown. If we take into account that there are many species that have only been observed a few times today, it is likely that there are many more rare species that have not even been documented".

Their results, say the authors, highlight the vulnerability of global forest biodiversity to anthropogenic changes, particularly land use and climate, since the survival of the rarest taxa is the most threatened.

Knowing, they underline, is essential to protect.

Therefore, they have applied their model to the available databases -both continental and global- to estimate the number of unknown tree species and have identified the areas of the world in which they are most likely to be discovered, which would increase their preservation possibilities.

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