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Biomass (Rev #5)



As defined by Wikipedia:



In stricter scientific applications, biomass is measured as the mass of organically bound carbon (C) that is present. The total live biomass on earth is about 560 billion tonnes C, (see B Groombridge et al) and the total annual primary production of biomass is just over 100 billion tonnes C/yr.


The total global live biomass has been estimated as 560 billion tonnes C, most of which is found in forests.


Most of this biomass is found on land, with only 5 to 10 billion tonnes C found in the oceans.

On land there is about 1,000 times more plant biomass (phytomass) than animal biomass (zoomass). About 18% of this plant biomass is eaten by the land animals. However in the ocean the animal biomass is nearly 30 times larger than the plant biomass. Most ocean plant biomass is eaten by the ocean animals.

biomass table

The total biomass of bacteria is estimated to equal that of plants. The number of prokaryotes on Earth is estimated to be around five million trillion trillion, or 5×10 305 \times 10^{30}, accounting for at least half the global biomass.


  • Biomass, Wikipedia.

  • B. Groombridge and M. D. Jenkins, Global Biodiversity: Earth’s Living Resources in the 21st century, World Conservation Monitoring Centre, World Conservation Press, Cambridge, 2011, page 11.

category: ecology