2. Plant material, vegetation, or agricultural waste that is used as a fuel or as a source of energy: "Efforts are being made to utilize more vegetable matter to produce fuel for all aspects of energy uses."
"Any solid, gaseous, or liquid fuel obtained from biomass may come from natural forms: such as, wood, peat, or a commercially produced form including ethanol from sugarcane residue; and diesel fuel can also be produced from waste vegetable oils."
"Biomass is a collective term for all organic substances of relatively recent (non-geological) origin that can be used for energy production, including industrial, commercial, and agricultural wood and plant residues; municipal organic waste; animal manure; and crops directly produced for energy purposes."
2. Pertaining to living organisms, plant and animal, in a particular geographical area: "The biomass species for each section include micro-organisms, plants, and animals."
"It has been estimated that there are about five million trillion trillion, or 5 × 1030 (5 nonillion) biomass bacteria on Earth with a total biomass equaling that of plants. Some researchers believe that bacteria are, and always have been, the dominant biomass forms of life on Earth exceeding the total of all plants and animals."
2. Gas such as methane or liquid fuel such as ethanol (ethyl alcohol) made from organic waste material, usually by microbial action.
3. A renewable fuel, e.g., biodiesel, biogas, and methane, that is derived from biological matter.
Units are grams of organic matter per square meter.
2. Plant-derived material usable as a renewable energy source, including wood energy crops; such as, hybrid poplars and willow trees, agricultural crops including soybeans and corn, and animal and other wastes.Biomass is one of the two most common energy sources in the U.S. today, along with hydropower. Forms of biomass; such as, wood can be burned to produce heat and generate electricity.
Agricultural crops can be chemically converted into fuels; such as, ethanol and biodiesel; these are the only known renewable liquid energy sources, and may one day replace petroleum and fossil-fuel.
It may be specified for a particular species; such as, earthworm biomass or for a general category; such as, herbivore biomass.
Estimates also exist for the entire global plant biomass and measurements of biomass can be used to study interactions between organisms, the stability of those interactions, and variations in population numbers.
Whenever dry biomass is measured, the material is dried to remove all water before weighing.
Biomass waste includes municipal solid waste from biogenic sources, landfill gas, sludge waste, agricultural crop byproducts, straw, and other biomass solids, liquids, and gases; but it excludes wood and wood-derived fuels (including black liquor), biofuels feedstock, biodiesel, and fuel ethanol.
It should be noted that some so-called biomass waste also includes energy crops grown specifically for energy production, which would not normally be considered waste.
Just like an oasis in the desert, these toxic sites attract an entire peripheral fauna constituted of sessile crustaceans; such as, the vent barnacles, which resemble a flower, or mobile crustaceans, like spider crabs.
The concept of biomass allows people to express the idea of the abundance of animal presence in volume without having to use headcounts as is the case when speaking of density.
It is useful in that living organisms vary too broadly in size for density to be a meaningful measure.