According to calculations published in the journal Global Change Biology by a research team at Germany’s Technical University of Munich (TUM), lightning is liable to destroy around 320 million trees every year. The team combined a popular global vegetation model with datasets of global lightning patterns and observational data. They then ran mathematical calculations to get a sense of the annual tally of lightning tree strikes. Based on their novel climate model, lightning manages to fatally injure 320 million trees per year—somewhere between 2.1 and 2.9 percent of annual plant biomass loss. The researchers believe their conclusions highlight the importance of factoring tree deaths from lightning into climatology studies.