The Amazon rainforest holds such a vast number of tree species than elsewhere in the world that it would take more than 300 years to catalog them all.
Indeed, for the last three centuries, intrepid explorers have been gathering data and recording information about various tree species in the Amazon.
So far, the total Amazonian tree species tally is at 11,676, according to a new study conducted by scientists from the Field Museum of Natural History.
Compiling A List Of Tree Species
Prior to the new research, no one has dared to precisely count and list down the tree species in the Amazon rainforest.
"Before this paper we didn't have a list of Amazonian trees," says tropical forest ecologist Nigel Pitman, one of the study authors.
But a 2013 report by the same team of Field Museum scientists had estimated that there must be around 16,000 tree species in total.
Now, in the new study, Pitman and his colleagues analyzed more than 500,000 digitized samples of flowers, leaves and fruits, producing what they consider is the first list of every known Amazonian tree type.
The research team combed through digitized records from around the world to produce the catalog. The oldest samples were taken in 1707, and the latest were gathered in 2015.
Pitman says the list of 11,676 tree species may mean that their 2013 estimate is "good" and that 4,000 of the rarest tree species in the Amazon have yet to be found and recorded.
He says that since the 1900s, between 50 and 200 new tree species were discovered in the Amazon each year.
Furthermore, the study suggests that ecologists' mission of discovering tree species is not yet over.
"[W]e won't be done discovering new tree species there for three more centuries," says Pitman.
The Purpose Of The Study
Meanwhile, Pitman admits that their catalog is not as methodically put together as those created by taxonomists who do it for a living, but he says that's "sort of the point."
Their main goal was to make an index that would only serve as a basis of a wiki that other scientists could contribute to.
Hans ter Steege, one of the authors of the study, says the list of tree species will prove invaluable for scientists studying the Amazon rainforest so they are not "just laboring in the dark."
The checklist provides ecologists with a better sense of what is growing in the Amazon, which could also help conservation efforts, he says.
Details of the new study are published in the journal Scientific Reports.
