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Reply to: Emphasizing declining populations in the Living Planet Report

Nature volume 601, pages E25–E26 (2022)Cite this article

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The Original Article was published on 26 January 2022

replying to G. Murali et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04165-z (2022)

We thank Murali et al.1 for continuing the discussion on vertebrate trends from our original article2; Murali et al.1 highlight two issues regarding the Living Planet Database (LPD) of vertebrate population trends, and the Living Planet Index (LPI) that aggregates these trends into one global statistic: (1) the LPI is insensitive to simultaneous removal of extreme population trends from both sides, and (2) biases in the LPD might mean that the LPI underestimates vertebrate declines. We note that the simultaneous removal approach of Murali et al.1 relates to our preliminary analysis, wherein we illustrated that the LPI is highly sensitive to populations with extreme trends by serially removing extreme populations from one side of the distribution at a time2. Our main analysis used an alternative modelling framework, a Bayesian hierarchical mixture (BHM) model, which statistically detected and separated trends in extreme clusters on both sides simultaneously (both positive and negative), and also examined the main cluster containing the majority of populations2. Nonetheless, we show here that the ‘simultaneous removals’ analysis of Murali et al.1 also supports our conclusions that the LPI pattern is driven by a small fraction of extremes.

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Fig. 1: Simulation analysis showing effect of a small 2.5% asymmetry on LPI.

References

  1. Murali, G. et al. Emphasizing declining populations in the Living Planet Report. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04165-z (2022).

  2. Leung, B. et al. Clustered versus catastrophic global vertebrate declines. Nature 588, 267–271 (2020)

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  3. Almond, R. E. A., Grooten, M. & Peterson, T. Living Planet Report 2020—Bending the Curve of Biodiversity Loss (World Wildlife Fund, 2020)

  4. Daskalova, G. N., Myers-Smith, I. H. & Godlee, J. L. Rare and common vertebrates span a wide spectrum of population trends. Nat. Commun. 11, 4394 (2020).

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  5. Leung, B., Greenberg, D. A. & Green, D. M. Trends in mean growth and stability in temperate vertebrate populations. Divers. Distrib. 23, 1372–1380 (2017).

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) Discovery grant to B.L.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Brian Leung & Anna L. Hargreaves

  2. Bieler School of Environment, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada

    Brian Leung

  3. Department of Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Dan A. Greenberg

  4. School of Biology and Ecology and Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Brian McGill

  5. Centre for Biological Diversity, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK

    Maria Dornelas

  6. Indicators and Assessments Unit, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London, UK

    Robin Freeman

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  1. Brian Leung
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  2. Anna L. Hargreaves
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  3. Dan A. Greenberg
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  4. Brian McGill
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  5. Maria Dornelas
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  6. Robin Freeman
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Contributions

B.L. wrote the response. A.C.H. and D.A.G. helped with writing, editing and discussing ideas. B.M. and M.D. discussed ideas with some editing. R.F. contributed discussions to the original manuscript2.

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Correspondence to Brian Leung.

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Leung, B., Hargreaves, A.L., Greenberg, D.A. et al. Reply to: Emphasizing declining populations in the Living Planet Report. Nature 601, E25–E26 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04166-y

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