ReviewPhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2023
Looking back on biodiversity change: lessons for the road ahead.
Review in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 24 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
24 citing papers in PubMed.
- Predicting Coral Cover Trends From Local to Broad Spatial Scales.Global change biology · 2026Article
- Linking species local trends from assemblage monitoring to global extinction risk.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Cities at Sea: Coastal Urbanization Generates Local Biodiversity Hotspots but Homogenizes Marine Fish Communities Regionally.Global change biology · 2026Article
- From paper to pixels - digitized maps of vascular plant distributions in Denmark in the early 20th century.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Degradation of fish food webs in the Anthropocene.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Six Decades of Losses and Gains in Alpha Diversity of European Plant Communities.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Archived natural DNA samplers reveal four decades of biodiversity change across the tree of life.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Little long-term change in regional species richness of tropical butterflies over the past 166 years masks turnover in community composition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Ancient environmental DNA indicates limited human impact on marine biodiversity in pre-industrial Iceland.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Shifting seas: understanding deep-time human impacts on marine ecosystems.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- First national survey of terrestrial biodiversity using airborne eDNA.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Divergent alpha and beta diversity trends of soil nematode fauna along gradients of environmental change in the Carpathian Ecoregion.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Distribution, species richness, and relative importance of different plant life forms across drylands in China.Plant diversity · 2025Article
- Increased resilience and a regime shift reversal through repeat mass coral bleaching.Ecology letters · 2024Article
- What Determines the Probability of Discovering a Species? A Study of the Completeness of Bryophyte Inventories in Tianmushan National Nature Reserve (Zhejiang, China).Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Local heterogenisation and regional homogenisation linked to habitat loss induced by dams in riparian forests of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Towards a standardized framework for AI-assisted, image-based monitoring of nocturnal insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- A concept for international societally relevant microbiology education and microbiology knowledge promulgation in society.Microbial biotechnology · 2024Article
- Global monitoring for biodiversity: Uncertainty, risk, and power analyses to support trend change detection.Science advances · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
14 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Estimating biodiversity change across the planet in the context of widespread human modification is a critical challenge. Here, we review how biodiversity has changed in recent decades across scales and taxonomic groups, focusing on four diversity metrics: species richness, temporal turnover, spatial beta-diversity and abundance. At local scales, change across all metrics includes many examples of both increases and declines and tends to be centred around zero, but with higher prevalence of declining trends in beta-diversity (increasing similarity in composition across space or biotic homogenization) and abundance. The exception to this pattern is temporal turnover, with changes in species composition through time observed in most local assemblages. Less is known about change at regional scales, although several studies suggest that increases in richness are more prevalent than declines. Change at the global scale is the hardest to estimate accurately, but most studies suggest extinction rates are probably outpacing speciation rates, although both are elevated. Recognizing this variability is essential to accurately portray how biodiversity change is unfolding, and highlights how much remains unknown about the magnitude and direction of multiple biodiversity metrics at different scales. Reducing these blind spots is essential to allow appropriate management actions to be deployed. This article is part of the theme issue 'Detecting and attributing the causes of biodiversity change: needs, gaps and solutions'.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.