Fig. 2: Widely used statistical models misrepresent biodiversity abundance trends.
From: Revealing uncertainty in the status of biodiversity change
Abundance trend projections across ten high-profile datasets under three different models. Circles represent the collective trend (the coefficient describing the change in abundance over time averaged across all species and locations) for each dataset in our three models (from left to right): random intercept, random slope and the correlated effect model that simultaneously accounts for temporal, spatial and phylogenetic correlative non-independence. We specify four categories of trend: significant increase—coefficient is positive and significant; non-significant increase—coefficient is positive but not significant (that is, no detectable change); non-significant decrease—coefficient is negative but not significant (that is, no detectable change); significant decrease—coefficient is negative and significant. Significance indicates that the coefficient does not overlap zero at a 50% credible interval. Coefficients and 95% credible intervals are available in Supplementary Table 4. We use the collective trend coefficient and 50% credible intervals (represented by shading) to produce abundance projections for each model in each dataset from an arbitrary baseline abundance of 100. Abundance projections cover the time span of the observed data and are presented on the log10 scale.
