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This is scientific American's 60 second science.

I'm Scott Hirschberger.

The chance that a human being like you will be struck by lightning is minuscule.

But what if you're a tall tree in the tropics?

Lightning happens in milliseconds.

We can't predict where it's going to be and we generally can't find it after it's happened.

So what a hard thing to study.

Evan Gora, an ecologist at the University of Louisville.

Now, for the first time, Gora and his colleagues were able to quantify the effects of lightning

strikes in tropical forests around the world, thanks to satellite data and a network of

ground sensors.

We saw that it's forced to have more lightning strikes hitting per hectare per year,

have fewer large trees per hectare, presumably because they're killed by lightning.

More biomass turns are over a year, so basically the lightning seems to be affecting the

forests and causing trees to die, and then they have less total biomass.

In a ground survey in Panama, the researchers found that a single lightning strike

typically damages more than 20 trees,

and within a year five or six of them die.

The scientists combined this figure with their satellite data from around the world

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