Biomass!!! :D

What is biomass? Why is it important?

Biomass is the ammount of organisms living in a certain area. Biomass can be measured for knowing the state of an acosystem, since it studies the ammount of energy available in an ecosystem. This will be useful, because by knowing the energy present in the ecosystem, we can know how many species will be able to live in there. 

How to measure Biomass?

There are several ways for measuring biomass, each of them has advantages and disadvantages in the process and results given:

• Obtaining the weight of an organism and multiply it times the ammount of organisims living in the area. The units are grams per meter squared. The disadvantage of this method is that it is difficult to know accurately the number of organisms of each specie, which in case of error, will highly modify the result of the measurement.
• Transect method, consists on tracing an imaginary line across the selected ecosystem, and counting the organisms that are in the quadrants following the transect.
• Quadrant method, is another method for measuring biomass in which an area is determined and  biomass is measured by applying other methods but only in the specified area.

 What about an estuary?
After biomass is collected at different trophic levels, a biomass pyramid can be made. Here's an example of an estuary, more specifically, Chesapeake Bay. Taking the following food chain:

phytoplankton -> clams -> blue crabs -> sandbar sharks

Firstly, the units will be measured in kg per cubic kilometer, since it is a aquatic ecosystem. We can calculate the amount of each species in the food chain, and we get the following information:

There are 31,333,333 units of phytoplankton in 2320 cubic km of water in Chesapeake Bay.
There are 9,200,000 clams in that same area.
There are 278,666 blue crabs.
There is one sandbar shark.

Then, considering the weight of each specie and the area, we can calculate biomass, which then can be shown in what is known as a biomass pyramid.