Large Wild Herbivores May Help Slow Climate Change 1222.rtf - By removing living and dead plants, large animals dispose of material that may fuel wildfires.
By consuming vegetation and excreting dung, they may improve availability of nutrients to plants and support the storage of carbon in vegetation and soil.
By creating gaps in the vegetation and dispersing seeds, they create diverse ecosystems with plenty of opportunities for a variety of plants to grow, making ecosystems more resilient and better able to deal with climate change.
By nibbling down polar region shrubs and trampling snow, large animals help maintain permafrost, helping prevent the release of carbon to the atmosphere.
Living Planet Repot Update - WWF 0914.pdf
- 180 pp, update of 2012 report farther below
The global Living Planet Index (LPI) reveals a continual decline in vertebrate populations over the last 40 years. This global trend shows no sign of slowing down. For this 10th edition of the Living Planet Report, the LPI methodology has been updated and fine-tuned to give a better representation of the global distribution of vertebrate species.
The weighted LPI (LPI-D) shows that the size of populations (the number of individual animals) decreased by 52% from 1970 to 2010. This 52% includes 56% declines in tropical populations and 36% in temperate zone populationss. It includes 39% declines for terrestrial species populations, 76% for fresh water ones, and 39% for marine ones. Populations in protected areas declined only 18%.
For terrestrial species, habitat loss to human land use – notably agriculture, cities and energy – is the major threat. For freshwater ones, habitat loss and fragmentation, connectivity (water level changes from dams, irrigation, etc.), pollution, and invasive species are the threats. For marine ones, stability followed a steep drop to till the mid-80s, with the largest declines in the tropics and Southern Ocean.
This is a steeper decline than the 28% reported in the previous edition, when data from North America and Europe – where long-term trend information has been more readily available – dominated the global LPI.
The LPI is calculated using trends in 10,380 populations of over 3,038 vertebrate species (fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals). These species groups have been comprehensively researched and monitored by scientists and the general public for many years, meaning that a lot of data is available to assess the state of specific populations and their trends over time.
Why Monarch Butterfly Numbers Are in Freefall 0713.rtf
updated from Brower et al., Insect Conser. & Diver., 5, 95, 2011
These figure summarize 1,000s of species declines (and increases) across regions.
India, Pakistan, SE China, SE Asia, Australia +.
Neotropical is Latin America.
The Global Living Planet Index suggests that across the globe, vertebrate populations were on average 28% smaller in 2008 than they were in 1970. This is based on trends in the size of 9,014 populations of 2,688 mammal, bird, reptile, amphibian and fish species – many more than in previous editions of the Living Planet Report (WWF, 2006b; 2008b; 2010a). Above, declines were greatest in tropics.
Shading on this, and all Living Planet Index figures represents the 95% confidence limits surrounding the trend; the wider the shading, the more variable the underlying trend (WWF/ZSL, 2012).
Section Map: Bio Impacts