other contexts, it may refer to dry weight (excluding water content), or to the mass of organic carbon, excluding inorganic components such as bones, shells, or teeth.

In 2018, Bar-On et al. estimated Earth's total live biomass at approximately 550 billion tonnes of carbon, the majority of which is found in plants. A 1998 study by Field et al. estimated global annual net primary production at just over 100 billion tonnes of carbon per year. While bacteria