2018-09-05 · Domestic poultry vs wild birds
Chickens now outweigh wild birds
Add up the mass of every bird. Farmed poultry — almost all chickens — are about three times the wild flock. The sky is not the census.
Biomass grids are about weight on Earth, not headcount — a whale and a mouse can share a color family but not a cell count story. This grid divides bird biomass (2018 snapshot) into colored bands — Farmed poultry and Wild birds — using equal squares so you compare shares, not country size on a map.
1 cell = 7,000 tonnes of carbon in birds (0.1% of bird biomass) · 1,000 cells
Context
The 2018 figures from Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo, PNAS 2018 put Farmed poultry at 71% of bird biomass and Wild birds at 29% — about 7 million tonnes of carbon in birds in this edition's rounding.
Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo, The biomass distribution on Earth, PNAS 2018: domesticated poultry ≈0.005 Gt C; wild birds ≈0.002 Gt C.
About 71% / 29% of that combined mass.
Bar-On, Phillips, and Milo, The biomass distribution on Earth, PNAS 2018: domesticated poultry ≈0.005 Gt C; wild birds ≈0.002 Gt C. About 71% / 29% of that combined mass. Cells rounded to 1,000.
Share and export
Credit this grid as Inagrid — https://inagrid.com/e/2018-09-05-chickens-vs-birds