Revealing uncertainty in the status of biodiversity change.

ABSTRACT: Biodiversity faces unprecedented threats from rapid global change¹. Signals of biodiversity change come from time-series abundance datasets for thousands of species over large geographic and temporal scales. Analyses of these biodiversity datasets have pointed to varied trends in abundance, including increases and decreases. However, these analyses have not fully accounted for spatial, temporal and phylogenetic structures in the data. Here, using a new statistical framework, we show across ten high-profile biodiversity datasets^2-11 that increases and decreases under existing approaches vanish once spatial, temporal and phylogenetic structures are accounted for. This is a consequence of existing approaches severely underestimating trend uncertainty and sometimes misest

SUBMITTER: Johnson TF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11041640 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature