The biomass distribution on Earth
By Y. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, Ron Milo. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2018
2,714 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Significance The composition of the biosphere is a fundamental question in biology, yet a global quantitative account of the biomass of each taxon is still lacking. We assemble a census of the biomass of all kingdoms of life. This analysis provides a holistic view of the composition of the biosphere and allows us to observe broad patterns over taxonomic categories, geographic locations, and trophic modes. A census of the biomass on Earth is key for understanding the structure and dynamics of the biosphere. However, a global, quantitative view of how the biomass of different taxa compare with one another is still lacking. Here, we assemble the overall biomass composition of the biosphere, establishing a census of the ≈550 gigatons of carbon (Gt C) of biomass distributed among all of the kingdoms of life. We find that the kingdoms of life concentrate at different locations on the planet; plants (≈450 Gt C, the dominant kingdom) are primarily terrestrial, whereas animals (≈2 Gt C) are mainly marine, and bacteria (≈70 Gt C) and archaea (≈7 Gt C) are predominantly located in deep subsurface environments. We show that terrestrial biomass is about two orders of magnitude higher than marine biomass and estimate a total of ≈6 Gt C of marine biota, doubling the previous estimated quantity. Our analysis reveals that the global marine biomass pyramid contains more consumers than producers, thus increasing the scope of previous observations on inverse food pyramids. Finally, we highlight that the mass of humans is an order of magnitude higher than that of all wild mammals combined and report the historical impact of humanity on the global biomass of prominent taxa, including mammals, fish, and plants.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Ecology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7059225e3fd6718a4f3326638d5e15fae0cd76ea
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Citations in the corpus
- Pervasive human-driven decline of life on Earth points to the need for transformative change (2019, neutral): “The global biomass of wild mammals is now less than 25% of that before the late Pleistocene megafaunal extinction—and less than 10% that of the world’s current human population (52).”
- Global biogeography of fungal and bacterial biomass carbon in topsoil (2020, neutral): “Fungi are more sensitive to anoxic conditions, and bacteria and archaea are important components in deep soils such as subsurface environments (Bar-On et al., 2018).”
- Vertebrates on the brink as indicators of biological annihilation and the sixth mass extinction (2020, positive): “The reason so many species are being pushed to extinction by anthropogenic causes is indicated by humans and their domesticated animals being some 30 times the living mass of all of the wild mammals that must compete with them for space and resources (43).”
- Marine DNA viral macro- and micro-diversity from pole to pole (2019, background): “In the oceans, the vast majority of biodiversity is contained within the microbial fraction containing prokaryotes and eukaryotic microbes, which represents 60%of its biomass (Bar-On et al., 2018).”
- The impacts of land plant evolution on Earth's climate and oxygenation state – An interdisciplinary review (2020, background): “The land biota (mainly plants) contains ~100 fold more biomass than that present in the marine realm (Bar-On et al., 2018), and there is yet still more organic carbon in soils than in the”
- The global soil community and its influence on biogeochemistry (2019, background): “In terms of biomass, fungi dominate global soil communities, with an approximate global biomass of 12 Gt carbon (C) (39).”