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Clustered Versus Catastrophic Global Vertebrate Declines by Brian Leung; Anna L. Hargreaves; Dan A. Greenberg; Brian McGill; Maria Dornelas; Robin Freeman is a Physics and Astronomy article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Clustered Versus Catastrophic Global Vertebrate Declines about?

Recent analyses have reported catastrophic global declines in vertebrate populations. However, the distillation of many trends into a global mean index obscures the variation that can inform conservation measures and can be sensitive to analytical decisions. For example, previous analyses have estimated a mean vertebrate decline of more than 50% since 1970 (Living Planet Index). Here we show, however, that this estimate is driven by less than 3% of vertebrate populations; if these extremely declining populations are excluded, the global trend switches to an increase. The sensitivity of global mean trends to outliers suggests that more informative indices are needed. We propose an alternative approach, which identifies clusters of extreme decline (or increase) that differ statistically from the majority of population trends. We show that, of taxonomic-geographic systems in the Living Planet Index, 16 systems contain clusters of extreme decline (comprising around 1% of populations; these extreme declines occur disproportionately in larger animals) and 7 contain extreme increases (around 0.4% of populations). The remaining 98.6% of populations across all systems showed no mean global

Who reads Clustered Versus Catastrophic Global Vertebrate Declines?

Author

Brian Leung; Anna L. Hargreaves; Dan A. Greenberg; Brian McGill; Maria Dornelas; Robin Freeman

Publisher

Springer Science and Business Media LLC

Published

2020

Language

EN

Field

Physics and Astronomy (Physical Sciences)