The Amazon rainforest is renowned for its biodiversity, but just 227 'hyperdominant' species account for half of all trees across the 6-million-square-kilometre basin.
Hans ter Steege of the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden, the Netherlands, and his colleagues analysed data from 1,170 plots scattered across the forest and then extrapolated their data to the entire basin. They calculated that the region contains around 390 billion trees with trunks of 10 centimetres or more in diameter, and some 16,000 species.
The authors suggest that the extreme dominance of a few species could simplify efforts to understand the large-scale ecology of the basin, but might complicate efforts to identify rare species that are at risk of extinction.
Science http://doi.org/pb2 (2013)
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Counting trees in the Amazon. Nature 502, 412 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/502412a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/502412a
