Rainforest Rules

Rainforests are important carbon 'sinks' (they store massive amounts of carbon, stripped from the 'greenhouse gas' carbon dioxide). They are also 'hotspots' for biodiversity. A new study suggests, rainforests in very different locations, follow a common pattern (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/11/pattern-found-in-worlds-rainforests-where-2-of-species-make-up-50-of-trees). The Earth's rainforests have a total of about 800 billion trees. One million tree samples were taken from more than 1500 rainforest locations in Africa; the Amazon and S-E Asia. Although these locations have very different characteristics, in all three, only 2% of that habitat's tree species, accounted for half the tree population. This was a total of circa 1000 species for the three rainforests. The other half, was made up of a total of 46,000 individually much rarer species. This patterns seems to work for rainforests, irrespective of where they are located.