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A pyramid of biomass shows the relationship between biomass and trophic level by quantifying the biomass present at each trophic level of an ecological community at a particular time. It is a graphical representation of biomass (total amount of living or organic matter in an ecosystem) present in unit area in different trophic levels.
An ecological pyramid is a graphical representation that shows, for a given ecosystem, the relationship between biomass or biological productivity and trophic levels. A biomass pyramid shows the amount of biomass at each trophic level. A productivity pyramid shows the production or turn-over in biomass at each trophic level.
English: A biomass pyramid shows the total mass of the organisms that each trophic level occupies in an ecosystem. Usually, producers have a higher biomass than any other trophic level. There must be higher amounts of biomass at the bottom of the pyramid to support the energy and biomass requirements of the higher trophic levels.
This is called an energy pyramid. The energy transferred between levels can also be thought of as approximating to a transfer in biomass, so energy pyramids can also be viewed as biomass pyramids, picturing the amount of biomass that results at higher levels from biomass consumed at lower levels. However, when primary producers grow rapidly and ...
A trophic pyramid (a) and a food-web (b) illustrating ecological relationships among creatures that are typical of a northern boreal terrestrial ecosystem. The trophic pyramid roughly represents the biomass (usually measured as total dry-weight) at each level. Plants generally have the greatest biomass.
Marine environments can have inversions in their biomass pyramids. In particular, the biomass of consumers (copepods, krill, shrimp, forage fish) is generally larger than the biomass of primary producers. Because of this inversion, it is the zooplankton that make up most of the marine animal biomass.
Illustration of a range of ecological pyramids, including top pyramid of numbers, middle pyramid of biomass, and bottom pyramid of energy. The terrestrial forest (summer) and the English Channel ecosystems exhibit inverted pyramids.Note: trophic levels are not drawn to scale and the pyramid of numbers excludes microorganisms and soil animals.
Biomass is a term used in several contexts: in the context of ecology it means living organisms, [1] and in the context of bioenergy it means matter from recently living (but now dead) organisms. In the latter context, there are variations in how biomass is defined, e.g., only from plants, [ 2 ] from plants and algae, [ 3 ] from plants and ...