英国谢菲尔德大学T. F. Johnson及其团队共同合作，近期取得重要工作进展。他们研究揭示出生物多样性变化现状的不确定性。相关研究成果2024年3月27日在线发表于《自然》杂志上。

据介绍，生物多样性面临着全球快速变化带来的前所未有的威胁。生物多样性变化的信号来自大地理和时间尺度上数千个物种的时间序列丰度数据集。对这些生物多样性数据集的分析指出了丰度的不同变化趋势，包括增加和减少。然而，这些分析并没有完全解释数据中的空间、时间和系统发育结构。

在新的统计框架下，研究人员展示了十个备受关注的生物多样性数据集，一旦考虑到空间、时间和系统发育结构，这些数据集在现有方法下的增加和减少就会消失。这是现有方法严重低估趋势不确定性和有时错误估计趋势方向的结果。在适当识别不确定性的修正平均丰度趋势下，研究人员未能在十个数据集中观察到95%可信区间的单一增加或减少趋势。

这强调了人们对巨大的空间和分类学尺度上的生物多样性变化知之甚少。尽管在大尺度上存在这种不确定性，但通过考虑空间、时间和系统发育结构，揭示出局部尺度预测准确性的提高。改进的预测为在与政策相关的尺度上估计生物多样性变化提供了希望，从而指导适应性保护应对措施。

附：英文原文

Title: Revealing uncertainty in the status of biodiversity change

Author: Johnson, T. F., Beckerman, A. P., Childs, D. Z., Webb, T. J., Evans, K. L., Griffiths, C. A., Capdevila, P., Clements, C. F., Besson, M., Gregory, R. D., Thomas, G. H., Delmas, E., Freckleton, R. P.

Issue&Volume: 2024-03-27

Abstract: Biodiversity faces unprecedented threats from rapid global change1. Signals of biodiversity change come from time-series abundance datasets for thousands of species over large geographic and temporal scales. Analyses of these biodiversity datasets have pointed to varied trends in abundance, including increases and decreases. However, these analyses have not fully accounted for spatial, temporal and phylogenetic structures in the data. Here, using a new statistical framework, we show across ten high-profile biodiversity datasets2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 that increases and decreases under existing approaches vanish once spatial, temporal and phylogenetic structures are accounted for. This is a consequence of existing approaches severely underestimating trend uncertainty and sometimes misestimating the trend direction. Under our revised average abundance trends that appropriately recognize uncertainty, we failed to observe a single increasing or decreasing trend at 95% credible intervals in our ten datasets. This emphasizes how little is known about biodiversity change across vast spatial and taxonomic scales. Despite this uncertainty at vast scales, we reveal improved local-scale prediction accuracy by accounting for spatial, temporal and phylogenetic structures. Improved prediction offers hope of estimating biodiversity change at policy-relevant scales, guiding adaptive conservation responses.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07236-z

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07236-z