Thousands Of Tree Species In Amazon Rainforest Discovered

First Posted: Jul 14, 2016 05:50 AM EDT

The scientists discovered numerous tree species in the Amazon rainforest and it might take 300 years to recognize them all.

The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports. The researchers aimed to identify the number of the tree species and to know the other remaining tree species, according to International Business Times.

Scientists have created a wiki for all of the trees in the Amazon rainforest https://t.co/5EPkZC0gX9 pic.twitter.com/YdRh2l5MvN

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) July 13, 2016

Did you know that #Peru contains the second largest segment of the #Amazon rainforest after #Brazil?#vacationmore pic.twitter.com/IRMvLZDGcT — Vacation With George (@vacation_more) July 4, 2016

The Amazonian rainforest is also known as the Amazon jungle. It covers most of the Amazon basin in South America. The 60 percent of the forest is within Brazil, 13 percent in Peru, 10 percent in Columbia and minor in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana and Guyana. The Amazon rainforest is about 5,500,000 square kilometers.

Orchid in the Amazon rainforest. pic.twitter.com/0m2mnikqwj — Mother Nature (@RainForestPics) July 13, 2016

The researchers from the Field Museum in Chicago estimated the number of tree species to around 16,000 in 2013. Nigel Pitman, the Field's Museum Senior Conservation Ecologist explained that an international team of botanists tallied up the number of species in over half a million museum specimens gathered in the Amazon between 1707 and 2015. They came up with a list of 11,676 Amazonian tree species. He further explained that they interpret this to mean that their 2013 approximation of 16,000 species is good and that about 4,000 of the rarest Amazonian trees remain to be recognized and described.

Mr. Pitman also said that the study indicates that they won't be done recognizing new tree species in Amazon rainforest for three more centuries. There are about 50 and 200 new tree species that have been discovered in the Amazon every year since 1900, according to Daily Mail.