Sapling is too generic to me. Two leaves in a 2 cm stick is a sapling but a juvenile 5 m high tree is also a sapling. Some trees grow really slow, some plants are not trees but have a &#x27;similar&#x27; function in nature (bamboo for example) and a lot of trees begin as multitrunked shrubs. Is not trivial to count trees in a forest when several trunks share the same root system so we can expect a lot of troubles and variations. We should focus in measuring live biomass probably instead. To group different saplings of different species and try to cook a result from this is always a problem.<p>Maybe to make people understanding the consequences of deforestation we need to create a new system and talk instead of ecological categories like seed, seedling, &#x27;treedler&#x27;, tree and perhaps &#x27;treelder&#x27;, but I&#x27;m just having fun with the words.<p>Ash, for example, is equal to &quot;a common tree&quot; but people forget often that the morphospecies &quot;a 500 years ash&quot; is extinct in most forests (as all species that depend on it). This is like if we try to define and understand human societies just looking at &quot;people from 20 years or less&quot;.