There are important theoretical and empirical reasons for expressing calorific values in terms of grams of carbon rather than grams dry weight. For phytoplankton, calorific value may be predicted with fairly high accuracy from carbon content, enabling much smaller samples to be used and resulting in a considerable saving in time. This removes the biggest stumbling block to the routine measurement of the energy efficiency of primary production.
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Platt et al. (1973) studied this question.