Talk:Forest

Simplify please!

This looks wayyy too complex. "Forests account for 75% of the gross primary production of the Earth's biosphere. They contain 80% of the Earth's plant biomass. Net primary production is estimated at 21.9 gigatonnes carbon per year for tropical forests, 8.1 for temperateforests, and 2.6 for boreal forests.(ref)Pan, Yude; Birdsey, Richard A.; Phillips, Oliver L.; Jackson, Robert B. 2013. The structure, distribution, and biomass of the world's forests. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 44: 593–62. [1]</ref>" Ely - Talk 16:19, 1 September 2021 (UTC)

Response

• It's typical of a science page that it will have some data in it. What suits one group causes others to tear their hair out! What worries me more is whether the impressive 80% includes the very real photosynthetic biomass in the oceans. I suspect it doesn't, which means the source is only dealing with land plants. I've found a page on En wiki called "Primary production", which has plenty of data. I will read it (see below). (Also I wonder if the rate of forest loss has already changed the data in the quoted source).

Did so, and found this interesting summary:

"Primary production in the ocean can be contrasted with primary production on land. Globally the ocean and the land each produce about the same amount of primary production, but in the ocean primary production comes mainly from cyanobacteria and algae, while on land it comes mainly from vascular plants.

Marine algae includes the largely invisible and often unicellular microalgae, which together with cyanobacteria form the ocean phytoplankton, as well as the larger, more visible and complex multicellular macroalgae commonly called seaweed."

Macdonald-ross (talk) 07:10, 2 September 2021 (UTC)

Hmm. I guess its fair. However, oceanic mass is WILDLY variable due to blooming periods and oceanic acidity and salinity by year. Another issue is it dry mass or wet mass? Dry mass means excluding water present in the organism, and wet means the actually mass.

Fun Fact: Trees don't give us oxygen you know? The animals (mostly insects and fungi) in the Amazon use it all up. Most of our O2 comes from diatoms near Greenland and Antarctica which is fueled by transpiration from the amazon eroding the andes for nutrients. Ely - Talk 07:18, 2 September 2021 (UTC)