I would like to emphasize that the number of trees and ecological biodiversity are things that are not necessarily tied together. If you’ve ever lived in a country that farms trees, you have seen the vast difference in the makeup of the forest biome compared to an older forest.
"Our best-performed and cross-validated random forest model ... "
Someone had fun with that abstract.
As an aside, though darker trees absorb more sunlight than snow/ground, and the albedo effect starts to dominate in this region (in terms of global warming) vs the CO2 benefit of more trees:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46577-1/figures/1
... so the mitigation potential is perhaps backward from what they state in the paper.
[1] The satellite that will 'weigh' world's 1.5 trillion trees:
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crldwjj6d6no
Someone had fun with that abstract.
As an aside, though darker trees absorb more sunlight than snow/ground, and the albedo effect starts to dominate in this region (in terms of global warming) vs the CO2 benefit of more trees: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-46577-1/figures/1 ... so the mitigation potential is perhaps backward from what they state in the paper.
(disclaimer that I work in a related area)