Lebewelt allgemein

Die Biomassenverteilung der Lebewesen auf der Erde

Die Zusammenstellung stammt aus einem Artikel von Yinon M. Bar-on aus dem Jahr 2018: "The biomass distribution on Earth". 

Graphical representation of the global biomass distribution by taxa. (A) Absolute biomasses of different taxa are represented using a Voronoi diagram, with the area of each cell being proportional to that taxa global biomass (the specific shape of each polygon carries no meaning). This type of visualization is similar to pie charts but has a much higher dynamic range (a comparison is shown in SI Appendix, Fig. S4). Values are based on the estimates presented in Table 1 and detailed in the SI Appendix. A visual depiction without components with very slow metabolic activity, such as plant stems and tree trunks, is shown in SI Appendix, Fig. S1. (B) Absolute biomass of different animal taxa. Related groups such as vertebrates are located next to each other. We estimate that the contribution of reptiles and amphibians to the total animal biomass is negligible, as we discuss in the SI Appendix. Visualization performed using the online tool at bionic-vis.biologie.uni-greifswald.de/.

Values are based on an extensive literature survey and data integration as detailed in the SI Appendix. Reported values have been rounded to reflect the associated level of uncertainty. We report an uncertainty projection for each kingdom as a fold-change factor from the mean, representing a range akin to a 95% confidence interval of the estimate. The procedure for deriving these projections is documented in detail in Materials and Methods and SI Appendix.