Sources of confusion in global biodiversity trends

Abstract

Populations and ecological communities are changing worldwide, and empirical studies exhibit a mixture of either declining or mixed trends. Confusion in global biodiversity trends thus remains, while assessing such changes is of major social, political, and scientific importance. Part of this variability may arise from the difficulty to reliably assess global biodiversity trends. Here, we conducted a literature review of studies documenting the temporal dynamics of global biodiversity. We classified the differences among approaches, data, and methodology used by the reviewed papers to reveal common findings and sources of discrepancies. We show that reviews and meta‐analyses, along with the use of global indicators, are more likely to conclude that trends are declining. On the other hand, the longer the data are available, the more nuanced are the trends they generate. Our results also highlight the lack of studies providing information on the impact of synergistic pressures on a global scale, making it even more difficult to understand the driving factors of the observed changes and how to decide conservation plan accordingly. Finally, we stress the importance of taking into account the sources of confusion identified, as well as the complexity of biodiversity changes, in order to implement effective conservation strategies. In particular, biodiversity dynamics are almost systematically assumed to be linear, while non‐linear trends are largely neglected. Clarifying the sources of confusion in global biodiversity trends should strengthen large‐scale biodiversity monitoring and conservation.