Poultry livestock on its own accounts for 0.2 percent of animal biomass - more than twice that of wild birds. We can calculate our share of total biomass as: 0.06 billion tonnes C (human biomass) / 546 billion tonnes (total biomass) * 100 = 0.01%.įigures for livestock don’t include fish catch or farming - of course, these also had significant impacts on marine life. If you’re interested in the comparison between biomass and the abundance of different taxonomic groups, you can explore this here. In humans, for example, they calculate the average carbon quantity of a person and multiply by the human population. To calculate the biomass of a taxonomic group, the researchers multiplied the carbon stock for a single organism by the number of individuals in that group. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201711842.
![world of life world of life](https://www.onecommunityglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/A-NEW-LIFE-IN-A-NEW-WORLD2.jpg)
humans account for just 0.01% of biomass, so we’d need about 70 trillion of us to match Earth’s collective biomass.whilst our perceptions are often focused on the animal kingdom, it accounts for only 0.4%.surprisingly in second place is the life we cannot see: tiny bacteria sum up to 13%.plants – mainly trees – dominate life on Earth: they account for more than 82% of biomass.In the graphic below I summarize the distribution of global biomass by taxonomic kingdom (on the left), with a magnified snapshot of the animal kingdom (on the right). Biomass is measured here in tonnes of carbon as it is a key building-block of life. (2018) quantified life using the metric of biomass. But these metrics can make it difficult to compare between taxa: small organisms may have a large population but still account for a very small percentage of Earth’s organic matter.įor a meaningful comparison, Bar-On et al. We could, for example, count the number of species, population sizes or the number of individual organisms.
![world of life world of life](https://www.earthlife.net/wp-content/uploads/birds.jpg)
There are several ways we can answer the question of how much life is on Earth.