search

GenomicsStandardsConsortium / mixs

Minimum Information about any (X) Sequence” (MIxS) specification
https://w3id.org/mixs
Creative Commons Zero v1.0 Universal
38 stars 21 forks source link

biomass vs microbial biomass- soil & sediment packages #309

Open mslarae13 opened 2 years ago

mslarae13 commented 2 years ago

Describe the bug biomass is available in sediment but not soil. Soil has specifically "microbial biomass".

The definition for biomass : Amount of biomass; should include the name for the part of biomass measured, e.g. Microbial, total. Can include multiple measurements

Definition for microbial_biomass: The part of the organic matter in the soil that constitutes living microorganisms smaller than 5-10 micrometer. If you keep this, you would need to have correction factors used for conversion to the final units

"biomass" providing only microbial as an example while "microbial_biomass" is available is confusing if someone is doing a general term search.

Also, biomass is applicable to soil, thinking about plant or insect. These could be quantified.

mslarae13 commented 2 years ago

Microbial biomass also provides a spot to detail the method. I think this should be added for biomass as the type of biomass is ambiguous.

mslarae13 commented 2 years ago

biomass vs microbial biomass because biomass has "Microbial" in the example, and this makes use of biomass vs microbial_biomass confusing. NMDC will add non-microbial biomass to clarify use until these terms are resolved.