Living biomass stocks

Our previous work has generated a census of the global biomass on Earth (Bar-On et al., 2018). Our lab builds upon this previous work and methodology to quantify global biomass in more detail and specifically in ways that can put better constraints on existing biosphere models. 

For example, our recent work has used different estimates of the dynamics of global plant biomass to show that in the last ≈30 years, global biomass stocks have not changed much, in contrast to the predictions of state-of-the-art models (Bar-On et al., 2025).

Our lab will follow up on these findings in several key ways:

• We will investigate the implications of these results on key model parameters that contribute most to uncertainties in model predictions about the future of the terrestrial biosphere, such as vegetation turnover, sensitivity of biomass growth to disturbances such as drought or fire, and losses of biomass from land use and land use change.
• We will improve estimates of the changes in global biomass by leveraging new machine learning methods to fuse together various data sources from different modalities of remote sensing and field observations.
• Generate new estimates to specific groups of organisms for which biomass estimates are still uncertain.