The majority of tropical rainforests are found in four biogeographic realms: the Afrotropical (mainland Africa, Madagascar, and scattered islands), the Australian (Australia, New Guinea, and the Pacific Islands), the Indomalayan (India, Sri Lanka, mainland Asia, and Southeast Asia), and the Neotropical (South America.

Tropical rainforests are found near the equator due to the amount of rainfall and the amount of sunshine these areas receive. Most tropical rainforests fall between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The high temperatures means that evaporation happens at a fast rate, resulting in frequent rainfall.

The largest rainforests are in the Amazon River Basin (South America), the Congo River Basin (western Africa), and throughout much of southeast Asia. Smaller rainforests are located in Central America, Madagascar, Australia and nearby islands, India, and other locations in the tropics.

Emergent Layer

Forest in the Altai Territory of Russia. By the above definition, forests cover approximately 31% of the Earth’s total land area, about 4.06 billion hectares (40.6 million square kilometers)….50 Countries with lowest forest cover in the world (as % of land area)

Russia

taiga forest

Nigeria

Kakamega Forest

Globally, there are estimated to be 3.04 trillion trees. This means that there are roughly 422 trees for every person on earth.

three trillion trees

The United States comes in fourth with 228 billion trees. Other countries with significant tree wealth include China (140 billion), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (100 billion), Indonesia (81 billion) and Australia (77 billion).

Using the same studies, it is estimated that 158 million trees are replanted each month around the globe, 5 million trees each day and about 7 thousand trees are planted each minute.

The WWF estimates we’re losing 27 football fields of forest every minute due to deforestation.

Pinning down exact numbers is nearly impossible, but most experts agree that we are losing upwards of 80,000 acres of tropical rainforest daily, and significantly degrading another 80,000 acres every day on top of that.

The annual rate of net forest loss declined from 19.2 million acres in 1990–2000 to 12.8 million acres in 2000–2010 and 11.6 million acres in 2010–2020. While an estimated 1.04 billion acres of forest have been lost worldwide to deforestation since 1990, the rate of deforestation also declined substantially.

200 000 acres of forest are cleared each day (deforestation ). That is 139 acres each minute. Assuming there are around 400 trees per acre (this depends greatly on the species, the age of the trees and if the area has been managed) making 55600 trees being destroyed every minute.

The data shows that from 2005 to February 2018, a total of 112,169 trees have been cut — an average of 24 per day.

Every year from 2011-2015 about 20 million hectares of forest was cut down. Then things started to speed up. Since 2016, an average of 28 million hectares have been cut down every year. That’s one football field of forest lost every single second around the clock.