We may sing about purple mountains and amber grains, but one of world’s most vital resources is its vast amount of carbon-catching, oxygen-spewing trees. Now, after six years of effort, NASA knows how many the US has, at least.
Josef Kellndorfer and Wayne Walker of NASA’s Woods Hole Research centre worked in conjunction with the National Geological Survey and US Forest Service to catalogue a mix of data gleaned from space-based radar, satellite sensors, computer models and old-fashioned tree counting. The map above shows the total amount of woody biomass in the USA.
It’s displayed at a 30m resolution, where every four pixels constitutes an acre and every 10 represents a hectare. In total, Kellendorfer estimates some five million trees reside on US soil. [NASA Earth Observatory via Business Insider via Geekosystem]
NOZ
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 9:21 AM5 million trees…that’s it? Should be a lot more then that.
stevjosco
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 10:22 AMExactly what I was thinking. I would have thought that one f those large sized managed forest of logging pines would have about 1 million trees.
Jack
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 12:11 PMYeah sounds like crap! Probable 5 billion!
Bailey
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 12:46 PMWould be interesting to see this statistic in 5 years time.
Lance
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 2:08 PMMaybe that’s whats wrong with America not enough oxygen going to there heads
and agreed 5mill seems rather low
Graeme
Sunday, January 15, 2012 at 2:53 PMThe 5 million figure only seems to appear in this article, not the sources. So it’s not like it’s bad fact checking, it’s totally ludicrous fiction.
MD
Monday, January 16, 2012 at 12:35 AMisn’t the US around 9 million square km.
(Checked.. 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km2) )
So if there was 0.6 trees per km^2 that would be 5 million…. NOT…
Check maths…
If we agree at least half the area is tree covered, and trees probably take up on average, 10 x 10m (afterall they mostly have pine type trees..). ok allow for 31.5 x31.5m my cursory maths comes in at 4.98 Billion (thousand million (10^9)) trees…. not too shabby, the good thing is having an estimate of the ‘correct number’ makes it easy to fit the answer…
Or smaller trees (ie real ones, and less tree cover, more like 10% cover with average size of 14x14m gives about the same result.
USA, what have you done with all your trees…. not bad, 90% clearing rate in 392 years… Of course there were deserts, prairies and mountains before the clearing started.. ok.
KW
Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 8:09 AMRead the article. It does not say that the U.S. has only 5 million trees, it says: “Kellndorfer estimates that their mapping database includes measurements of about five million trees.”
The DATABASE contains data for 5 million trees.