October 17, 2013 at 04:53PM Amazon rainforest: the first large-scale inventory has revealed the hyper-dominance of 227 tree species

An international study, involving scientists from CIRAD, the IRD, INRA and the CNRS, with the support of the IRD herbarium in French Guiana, recently produced the first large-scale inventory of the trees in the Amazon Basin. The researchers showed that the world's largest tropical rainforest comprises almost 390 billion trees belonging to some 16 000 species. They demonstrated that just 227 species were hyper-dominant, accounting for more than half the trees in the rainforest. The results of the study, which also estimated the number of rare species at 11 000, are being published on 18 October 2013 in the journal Science, in the form of a summary.

via CIRAD - Actualités / News http://www.cirad.fr/news/all-news-items/press-releases/2013/inventory-of-amazonian-trees