The team collected their data by analyzing over 500,000 digitized flower, leaf, and fruit samples, all of which were taken from digitized records gathered around the world.
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Since 1900, between 50 and 200 new species of tree have been discovered in the Amazon every year.
In a new paper in Scientific Reports, the same scientists delved into museum collections from around the world to confirm just how many tree species have been recorded in the Amazon so far-and how many have yet to be discovered.
“We came away with a list of 11,676 Amazonian tree species”, said study co-author Nigel Pitman, The Field Museum’s Mellon Senior Conservation Ecologist, in a statement. The number of tree species that have so far been discovered in the Amazon rainforest is 11,676, and a team of researchers have suggested that the present number is just barely scratching the surface of the complete amount yet to be discovered, according to Tech Times.
The exact number of Amazonian tree species has always been a mystery.
Admitting that the list isn’t necessarily comprehensive and completely accurate, the team say it is there as a basis list for others to add to it – a sort of wiki that other researchers can contribute to and critique. “Our analysis suggests that we won’t be done discovering new tree species there for three more centuries”.
” The Amazon rainforest is awash in different types of trees – nearly 12,000 species and counting, a new study finds”.
But according to the estimations of a 2013 report by the same group of Field Museum scientists, there must be almost 16,000 tree species as a whole. Identifying the remaining tree species could take decades, leaving plenty for future ecologists and scientists to study.
“We couldn’t have written this paper without digitisation efforts”, said Dr Pitman. This data – including photos and digital records – was housed on the Global Biodiversity Information Facility and SpeciesLink, two large online repositories of natural history collection data, ter Steege said. “We interpret this to mean that our 2013 estimate of 16,000 species is good, and that about 4,000 of the rarest Amazonian trees remain to be discovered and described”.
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“We needed to clean the data a lot (spelling errors, location errors), [and] take out the non-trees and collections not in the Amazon”, ter Steege said.
