By Steve Johnson
There are almost 400 billion trees in the Amazon River basin, “close to the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy,” says Nigel Pitman, a Field Museum visiting scientist who is second author of a new study that provides the best answer yet to this difficult-to-quantify question.
The study, published today in the journal Science, calculates that there are roughly 16,000 tree species in the vast and varied region, roughly the size of the continental U.S., but that just 227 of those species, including Brazil nut, chocolate, rubber, and acai berry trees, comprise about half of all the trees.
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