Over 9,000 tree species on Earth remain undiscovered, says new international study

In a first-of-its-kind, landmark effort to make an estimate of the number of different species of trees existing around the world, scientists have found out that thousands of kinds remain undiscovered till date.

The study is a massive and ambitious international effort where 100 scientists came together and found out that the total number of tree species on Earth is 73,000. However, humans have only 64,000 of them discovered and documented.

The study claims 9,200 tree species have remained elusive to scientific discovery. How is this possible? Here’s what the scientists say.

Thousands of undiscovered tree species

Explaining the study, quantitative forest ecologist Jingjing Liang from the Purdue University in US reportedly said, “We combined individual datasets into one massive global dataset of tree-level data. Each set comes from someone going out to a forest stand and measuring every single tree – collecting information about the tree species, sizes, and other characteristics. Counting the number of tree species worldwide is like a puzzle with pieces spread all over the world.”

As part of the study, two massive sets of data from the Global Forest Biodiversity Initiative and TreeChange was pooled together to get a consolidated account of years of tree cataloguing on the ground.

The researchers concluded that 9,200 tree species are as yet undiscovered. However, the scientists acknowledge that the estimate is not based on complete data as there are areas where tree cataloguing and mapping is limited.

The researchers wrote in the study, “Our estimates at continental scales show that roughly 43 percent of all Earth's tree species occur in South America, followed by Eurasia (22 percent), Africa (16 percent), North America (15 percent), and Oceania (11 percent).”

They also mention that the continent of South America has likely more undiscovered tree species than others at about 40%.