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Emphasizing declining populations in the Living Planet Report

Nature volume 601, pages E20–E24 (2022)Cite this article

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Matters Arising to this article was published on 26 January 2022

The Original Article was published on 18 November 2020

arising from B. Leung et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2920-6 (2020)

The Living Planet Report1, which has been published biannually since 1998, is key for understanding trends in wildlife populations and promoting sound conservation1,2,3,4. Leung et al.5 recently disagreed with the conclusions of the Living Planet Report and found that the overall pattern of population declines stems from very few populations (extreme clusters), beyond which global vertebrate populations are not declining. However, when properly accounting also for the influence of the fastest-increasing populations, we find that the overall declines in the Living Planet Report are practically unchanged. Moreover, the Living Planet Database is heavily biased towards populations that receive more conservation attention, indicating that the true population trends are indeed dire and may actually be worse than depicted in the Living Planet Report.

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Fig. 1: The effects of three different extreme population removal strategies to assess the sensitivity of overall growth rates.
Fig. 2: The probability of LPI populations’ sampling location to be inside protected areas for given species range overlap with protected areas.

Data availability

The Living Planet Database is available from the LPI website (https://livingplanetindex.org). The Protected Area maps are available at the World Database of Protected Area (https://www.protectedplanet.net). Species range size was obtained from the IUCN, BirdLife databases (https://www.iucnredlist.org; https://www.birdlife.org) and from Roll et al.10 for reptiles.

Code availability

The R codes associated with the study are provided in the Supplementary Information.

References

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 406/19).

Author information

Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Gopal Murali, Gabriel Henrique de Oliveira Caetano, Goni Barki

  2. These authors jointly supervised this work: Shai Meiri, Uri Roll

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Jacob Blaustein Center for Scientific Cooperation, The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel

    Gopal Murali & Gabriel Henrique de Oliveira Caetano

  2. Mitrani Department of Desert Ecology, The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel

    Gopal Murali, Gabriel Henrique de Oliveira Caetano, Goni Barki & Uri Roll

  3. Albert Katz International School for Desert Studies, The Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Midreshet Ben-Gurion, Israel

    Goni Barki

  4. School of Zoology & The Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

    Shai Meiri

Authors
  1. Gopal Murali
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  2. Gabriel Henrique de Oliveira Caetano
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  3. Goni Barki
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  4. Shai Meiri
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  5. Uri Roll
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Contributions

All of the authors conceived the study. G.H.d.O.C. downloaded LPI data and conducted sensitivity analyses. G.H.d.O.C., G.B. and G.M. assembled and analysed the dataset. All of the authors drafted and substantially revised the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Uri Roll.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing interests.

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended Data Fig. 1 The probability of LPI populations’ sampling location to be inside protected areas for given species range overlap with protected areas (by taxon).

Taxon was included as an interaction with the overlap area. The solid red line represents a generalized linear mixed model with the binomial fit and dashed lines 95% confidence interval. The black line represents the expected slope of 1 if populations were sampled at random in the species’ range. The histograms represent the proportion of overlap of species ranges with protected areas. Red, LPI locations found within protected areas; blue, LPI location found outside protected areas.

Extended Data Fig. 2 The probability of LPI populations’ sampling location to be inside protected areas for given species range overlap with protected areas (by realm–domain combination).

Realm-domain combination was included as interaction with overlap area. The solid red line represents a generalized linear mixed model with the binomial fit and dashed lines 95% confidence interval. The black line represents the expected slope of 1 if populations were sampled at random in the species’ range. The histograms represent the proportion of overlap of species ranges with protected areas. Red, LPI locations found within protected areas; blue, LPI location found outside protected areas.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary References, and the R code.

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Murali, G., de Oliveira Caetano, G.H., Barki, G. et al. Emphasizing declining populations in the Living Planet Report. Nature 601, E20–E24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04165-z

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