The global biomass of mammals since 1850
Creators
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1.
Weizmann Institute of Science
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2.
Ben-Gurion University of the Negev
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3.
California Institute of Technology
Abstract
Mammals are of central interest in ecology and conservation science. Here, we estimate the trajectory of mammal biomass globally over time — including humans, domesticated and wild mammals. According to our estimates, in the 1850s, the combined biomass of wild mammals was ≈200 Mt (million tonnes), roughly equal to that of humanity and its domesticated mammals at that time. Since then, human and domesticated mammal populations have grown rapidly, reaching their current combined biomass of ≈1100 Mt. During the same period, the total biomass of wild mammals decreased by more than 2-fold. We estimate that, despite a moderate increase in the recent decades, the global biomass of wild marine mammals has declined by ≈70% since the 1850s. This provides a broader perspective to observed species extinctions, with ≈2% of marine mammal species recorded as extinct during the same period. While historical wild mammal biomass estimates rely on limited data and have various uncertainties, they provide a complementary perspective to species extinctions and other metrics in tracking the status of wildlife. This work additionally provides a quantitative view on the rapid human-induced shift in the composition of mammalian biomass over the past two centuries.
Copyright and License
© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Acknowledgement
We thank Ariel Amir, Trevor Branch, Roee Ben-Nissan, Phil Hammond, Gabriel Henrique de Oliveira Caetano, Eric Galbraith, Ian Hatton, Patrik Henriksson, Avi Flamholz, Tamir Klein, Samuel Lovat, Heike Lotze, Douglas McCauley, Shai Meiri, Henrik Österblom, Yitzhak Pilpel, Itai Raveh, Yuval Rosenberg, Ron Sender, Ronny Sthoeger, Els Vermeulen, Tali Wiesel, David Zeevi for their intellectual insights for this study. This work was supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech and the Schwartz-Reisman Collaborative Science Program at the Weizmann Institute of Science. This research was generously supported by the Institute for Environmental Sustainability (IES) at the Weizmann Institute of Science. Prof. Ron Milo is the Director of the Institute for Environmental Sustainability (IES) and the incumbent of the Charles and Louise Gartner Professorial Chair.
Data Availability
The data used in this study are all available or linked in the designated GitLab repository, https://gitlab.com/milo-lab-public/mammal_biomass_since_1850. All Figures from the main manuscript and SI were created using the Python Matplotlib library. All of the source code is available on our online Gitlab repository. The raw data of human BMI data is available at https://www.ncdrisc.org/data-downloads-adiposity.html; human population by age https://population.un.org/wpp/; human height at https://uni-tuebingen.de/fakultaeten/wirtschafts-und-sozialwissenschaftliche-fakultaet/faecher/fachbereich-wirtschaftswissenschaft/wirtschaftswissenschaft/lehrstuehle/volkswirtschaftslehre/wirtschaftsgeschichte/forschung/data-hub-height.html; country income level https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519-world-bank-country-and-lending-groups. These are also linked directly in the designated GitLab repository.
Code Availability
The code used to analyze data and generate figures for this study is all available in the designated GitLab repository, https://gitlab.com/milo-lab-public/mammal_biomass_since_1850.
Contributions
L.G., E.N., and R.M. conceived the idea, designed and performed research, analyzed data and created visualizations; L.G., N.R., U.M. collected and curated data; L.G., U.R., R.P., E.N., and R.M. wrote the paper.
Supplemental Material
Supplementary Information:
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s41467-025-63888-z.pdf
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Additional details
Identifiers
- PMID
- 41145432
- PMCID
- PMC12559707
Funding
- California Institute of Technology
- Resnick Sustainability Institute -
- Weizmann Institute of Science
Dates
- Accepted
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2025-09-01