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takyon writes:

The Living Planet assessment has found that global vertebrate wildlife populations have declined by 58% since 1970, and suggests that vertebrates will have declined by two-thirds in 2020:

The Living Planet Report is published every two years and aims to provide an assessment of the state of the world's wildlife. This analysis looked at data collected on 3,700 different species of birds, fish, mammals, amphibians and reptiles - about 6% of the total number of vertebrate species in the world. The researchers then analysed how the population sizes had changed over time since 1970. The last report, published in 2014, estimated that the world's wildlife populations had halved over the last 40 years.

[...] However, Living Planet reports have drawn some criticisms. Stuart Pimm, professor of conservation ecology at Duke University in the United States, said that while wildlife was in decline, there were too many gaps in the data to boil population loss down to a single figure. "There are some numbers [in the report] that are sensible, but there are some numbers that are very, very sketchy," he told BBC News. "For example, if you look at where the data comes from, not surprisingly, it is massively skewed towards western Europe. When you go elsewhere, not only do the data become far fewer, but in practice they become much, much sketchier... there is almost nothing from South America, from tropical Africa, there is not much from the tropics, period. Any time you are trying to mix stuff like that, it is is very very hard to know what the numbers mean. They're trying to pull this stuff in a blender and spew out a single number.... It's flawed."

But Dr Freeman said the team had taken the best data possible from around the world. "It's completely true that in some regions and in some groups, like tropical amphibians for example, we do have a lack of data. But that's because there is a lack of data. We're confident that the method we are using is the best method to present an overall estimate of population decline. It's entirely possible that species that aren't being monitored as effectively may be doing much worse - but I'd be very surprised if they were doing much better than we observed."

The Living Planet Report 2016 can be downloaded here.

Also at CNN.

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