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Comment
. 2018 Jun 19;115(25):6328-6330.
doi: 10.1073/pnas.1807019115. Epub 2018 May 23.

The scale of life and its lessons for humanity

Matthew G Burgess  1   2 , Steven D Gaines  1   2
Affiliations
Comment

The scale of life and its lessons for humanity

Matthew G Burgess et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. .
No abstract available

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
A compares scales of human and natural stocks and flows of carbon (data from refs. , , –, and ; see text for description). “Animal Biomass” includes both human and nonhuman biomass, from Bar-On et al.’s (1) table 1. “Anthropogenic Animal Biomass” is the subset including human biomass, livestock biomass, and animal aquaculture biomass. For fossil fuel reserves, 1,500 Gt C is shown, which is the midpoint of the IPCC’s approximate range (18). B shows the changes in energy consumption from photosynthetic (biomass and fossil fuels) and nonphotosynthetic (nuclear and renewables) sources over the last ∼50 y (data from ref. 16), as well as the carbon (from energy, cement production, and flaring) and energy intensities of the global economy (gigatons of CO2/2011 international dollars, and zettajoules/2011 international dollars, respectively; both shown as a fraction of their 2010 value) over the same period (data from refs. , , and 19).
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment on

  • The biomass distribution on Earth.
    Bar-On YM, Phillips R, Milo R. Bar-On YM, et al. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018 Jun 19;115(25):6506-6511. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1711842115. Epub 2018 May 21. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2018. PMID: 29784790 Free PMC article.

References

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    1. Trebilco R, Baum JK, Salomon AK, Dulvy NK. Ecosystem ecology: Size-based constraints on the pyramids of life. Trends Ecol Evol. 2013;28:423–431. - PubMed
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