3.1: Biomass of organisms living in different environments
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Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\). Biomass distribution of organisms living in different environments (marine -blue-, terrestrial -brown- and deep subsurfaces -black). (A) Absolute biomass is represented using a Voronoi diagram, with the area of each cell proportional to the overall biomass in each environment. (B) Fraction of the biomass of each group concentrated in the terrestrial, marine, or deep subsurface environment. Numbers are expressed in gigatons of carbon. [Source: diagram after Bar-On et al. ref [4]; Open Access article distributed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license]
The differences in global biomass between terrestrial and marine environments are highly marked (Figure 7 and Table 2). The ocean covers 71% of the Earth’s surface and occupies a much larger volume than the terrestrial environment, yet the terrestrial biomass, at ≈470 Gt C, is about two orders of magnitude higher than the ≈6 Gt C of the marine biomass, as shown in Figure 7A. In contrast, the primary productivity of the two environments is roughly equal [23].
- For plants, most biomass is concentrated in terrestrial environments (plants are only a small fraction of marine biomass, <1 Gt C, in the form of algae -green and red- and seagrass; ).
- For animals, most biomass is concentrated in the marine environment, from fish (≈0.7 Gt C), marine arthropods (≈1 Gt C), molluscs, and annelids.
- For bacteria and archaea, most of the biomass is concentrated in deep subsurface environments [24],[25], such as deep aquifers and the ocean’s crust, which may hold the largest aquifer on Earth [26].
Table \(\PageIndex{1}\). Global biomass of taxa in terrestrial, marine, or deep subsurface environments. [Table based on data from Bar-On et al. ref [4]; Open access article distributed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license]
However, several of the results in The table should be interpreted with caution due to the large uncertainty associated with some of the estimates, primarily those for total terrestrial protists, marine fungi, and -more broadly- contributions from deep subsurface environments (See Focus How to estimate global biomass?).