Inside Biodiversity How Concerning Is Biodiversity Change?
Jul 3, 2025
Henrique Pereira, a research group leader at iDiv and professor at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, shares insights on biodiversity change. He highlights alarming trends, like the decline of common North American birds, while celebrating successful recoveries due to effective environmental policies. Discussing the complexities of measuring biodiversity, he critiques oversimplified approaches and underscores the importance of stakeholder involvement in policymaking. Ultimately, Pereira encourages a balanced narrative that blends doom with hope in biodiversity conversations.
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Scale Changes The Biodiversity Story
- Biodiversity metrics and scales matter: species counts, ranges, and abundances tell different stories at local, regional, and global scales.
- Local species richness can rise while global species loss continues because of heterogeneous, non-linear dynamics.
Sampling Bias Masks True Local Trends
- Existing time-series datasets are spatially biased and often miss places with major land-use conversion.
- Those sampling gaps make global averages of local richness trends unreliable and highly uncertain.
Average Local Declines Are Very Small
- Model-based reconstructions suggest only a very small average local species richness decline (~2% over 90 years).
- That tiny signal is spatially mixed and likely has negligible direct ecosystem-function implications at global average scales.