Nearly 6,000 monitored vertebrate species across more than 35,000 populations declined by an average of 73% from 1970 to 2022, the World Wide Fund ​for Nature said in its latest Living Planet Report published on Thursday.

  • Artisian@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Ok; I’ve thought through several examples. The geometric mean is heavily biased to show a decrease IMO. A species could have it’s total population grow substantially, but if most of that growth is to already large/successful subsets, then it’ll almost certainly show as a negative (geometric) average change, even with ~noise on the other populations. I think you should only see a positive metric here if most species measured are invasive; growing extremely fast in places not prepared for them. (and being careful not to measure the things getting killed by the new invaders)