World's Largest Trees - National Geographic Dec 2012

[two40]

Just a heads up to check out the latest issue (Dec 2012) of National Geographic. The cover story is about the world's largest trees; and more specifically about The President, a giant Sequoia in California.

This tree is 3,200 years old, holds 82,000 cones each with ~200 seeds (that's over 15 million seeds) and has close to 2 billion leaves. There are some other interesting facts and none more impressive than it's still growing and now faster than ever.

Check it out if you get the chance. There's also a two page spread on buildings made out of wood, both modern and a 1,200 year old pagoda from Nara, Japan.

[A Duke]

You have to wonder at the people that have nothing else to do but count these things just to wow us.
Regards

[two40]

You have to wonder at the people that have nothing else to do but count these things just to wow us.
Regards

They're called scientists.

They actually counted every branch and measured them to come up with a figure for how many cubic feet which was 54,000. I guess that's bigger than your average gum tree.

[dabbler]

They're called scientists.

More often than not, they're members of the sub-species commonly known as "postgrads".

[AlexS]

Counting leaves isn't just done for fun, you know. Years ago I saw a project in the Melbourne water supply catchments where leaf count was one of many parameters measured to compare several different catchment management strategies. The counting method was to train the counters to make accurate estimates by doing actual counts on different sized branches of different species. Estimates were then made for representative sample coups in each catchment.

And while the research project in each catchment might be carried out by postgrads working towards a Ph.D., I reckon most of the actual counting would be done by optimistic/ambitious undergrads.