Featured Journal Content – Stewardship

Nature
Volume 587 Issue 7832, 5 November 2020
http://www.nature.com/nature/current_issue.html
News & Views | 14 October 2020
Satellites could soon map every tree on Earth
An analysis of satellite images has pinpointed individual tree canopies over a large area of West Africa. The data suggest that it will soon be possible, with certain limitations, to map the location and size of every tree worldwide.
Niall P. Hanan & Julius Y. Anchang
… A previous estimate2 of the total number of trees on a global scale was obtained using field data from approximately 430,000 forest plots around the world. The authors of that study used statistical regression models to estimate tree density between the field sites, on the basis of vegetation type and climate. Their analysis suggested that there are approximately three trillion trees globally. However, this approach to tree-density estimation has inherent errors and uncertainties, particularly for drylands, for which relatively few field measurements are available to calibrate the models….

Article | 14 October 2020
An unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel
Deep learning was used to map the crown sizes of each tree in the West African Sahara, Sahel and sub-humid zone using submetre-resolution satellite imagery, revealing a relatively high density of trees in arid areas.
Martin Brandt, Compton J. Tucker[…] & Rasmus Fensholt
Abstract
A large proportion of dryland trees and shrubs (hereafter referred to collectively as trees) grow in isolation, without canopy closure. These non-forest trees have a crucial role in biodiversity, and provide ecosystem services such as carbon storage, food resources and shelter for humans and animals1,2. However, most public interest relating to trees is devoted to forests, and trees outside of forests are not well-documented3. Here we map the crown size of each tree more than 3 m2 in size over a land area that spans 1.3 million km2 in the West African Sahara, Sahel and sub-humid zone, using submetre-resolution satellite imagery and deep learning4. We detected over 1.8 billion individual trees (13.4 trees per hectare), with a median crown size of 12 m2, along a rainfall gradient from 0 to 1,000 mm per year. The canopy cover increases from 0.1% (0.7 trees per hectare) in hyper-arid areas, through 1.6% (9.9 trees per hectare) in arid and 5.6% (30.1 trees per hectare) in semi-arid zones, to 13.3% (47 trees per hectare) in sub-humid areas. Although the overall canopy cover is low, the relatively high density of isolated trees challenges prevailing narratives about dryland desertification5,6,7, and even the desert shows a surprisingly high tree density. Our assessment suggests a way to monitor trees outside of forests globally, and to explore their role in mitigating degradation, climate change and poverty.