According to the estimations of a new study, there are around 3.04 trillion trees on planet Earth, which means around 400 trees for every person. Researchers mentioned that before humans started cutting down the forests, the Earth was home to around twice as many trees.

A postdoctoral fellow at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, Thomas Crowther, who led the study, said that since the start of human civilization, the number of trees cut down is around nearly 3 trillion. Crowther said that it was an astronomical figure.

The earlier estimations of Earth's current tree population put the number of trees at 400.25 billion, which is almost an order of magnitude less than the new tally.

Scientists mentioned that the difference between the two must be related to how they were calculated. In the previous studies, satellite data was used for determining how many trees were present on Earth. That one was tricky as satellites can correctly detect the forested areas of the planet but mostly they can't notice an individual tree.

Crowther said, "Satellite images can tell you a lot about the forest area and canopy cover, but what we provide is a more detailed understanding of what is going on beneath the surface".

Published in Nature, the latest study used satellite imagery, but at the same time, it also relied on 429,775 ground-based measurements of tree density, in which a human being counted the number of trees present in an area.