The living layer of the Earth: the thin film of organisms and organic processes that sits between the Geosphere below and the Noosphere above. The term was introduced by geologist Eduard Suess in 1875 and formalized as a scientific concept by Vladimir Vernadsky in The Biosphere (1926), which established life as a geological force on par with the movement of continents and the circulation of the atmosphere. Vernadsky’s central finding: the composition of the atmosphere, the distribution of sedimentary rock, the chemistry of the oceans, and the cycles of most reactive elements are products of biological activity, not the setting in which biology happens.
In the BioConomy corpus, the Biosphere is the middle stratum in Vernadsky’s three-sphere stratigraphy. It is what the Geosphere becomes when organized by life, and it is what the Noosphere depends on but does not produce. The BioHub operates at the seam between the three spheres: it holds a specific watershed’s Biosphere (soil biology, hydrological function, biodiversity, ecosystem processes) in trust, publishes what that Biosphere contains and requires through its wiki, and organizes the coordination work needed to keep the Biosphere functioning as the substrate the Noosphere and the wider human economy depend on. The Tenderable Services Portfolio (water yield, carbon sequestration, biodiversity data, heritage and tourism, food systems, coordination-as-employment) names six domains where Biospheric function becomes contractable to external counterparties.
Related terms
- Geosphere
- Noosphere
- BioRegion
- BioScore
- Coordination Node
- Tenderable Services Portfolio
- From Geosphere to Noosphere
Sources and associated figures
- Suess, E. (1875). Die Entstehung der Alpen. Vienna: Braumüller. First use of the term “biosphere.”
- Vernadsky, V. I. (1926). The Biosphere. Translated by D. B. Langmuir. Copernicus, 1998.
- Vladimir Vernadsky
Provenance
Created 2 September 2026 to complete the three-sphere stratigraphy alongside the existing Geosphere and Noosphere pages. The term is standard in Earth science; its integration with the BioConomy corpus’s coordination frameworks is original to this wiki.