Global monitoring for biodiversity: Uncertainty, risk, and power analyses to support trend change detection

Highlights

Global targets aim to reverse biodiversity declines by 2050 but require knowledge of current trends and future projections under policy intervention.

First, given uncertainty in measurement of current trends, we propose a risk framework, considering probability and magnitude of decline. While only 11 of 198 systems analyzed (taxonomic groups by country from the Living Planet Database) showed declining abundance with high certainty, 20% of systems had a 70% chance of strong declines. Society needs to decide acceptable risks of biodiversity loss.

Second, we calculated statistical power to detect trend change using ~12,000 populations from 62 systems currently showing strong declines. Current trend uncertainty hinders our ability to assess improvements. Trend change is detectable with high certainty in only 14 systems, even if thousands of populations are sampled, and conservation action reduces net declines to zero immediately, on average.

We provide potential solutions to improve monitoring of progress toward biodiversity targets.