Paris (HRNW) – A first count of trees in Africa’s drylands has enabled scientists to calculate how much carbon they store and could help devise better conservation strategies for the region and beyond, a study said Wednesday.
The number of trees in the vast region — the count came to nearly 10 billion — has not been known up to now, and the new data could prove crucial for slowing or preventing desertification, the authors said.
“(It) tells us about the carbon cycle and how much carbon we have in trees is mitigating climate change and our abuse of fossil fuels,” Compton Tucker, co-lead author of the study published in the journal Nature, told .
Dryland trees capture carbon for much longer than grasses and other non-woody species in the region, even if individually they do not store huge amounts.
The data show there are 9.9 billion trees within Africa’s drylands: semi-arid Sub-Saharan Africa north of the Equator, which includes the Sahel and covers nearly 10 million square kilometres (four million square miles) of land from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea.