Living Planet Index
About the Index
What kind of data?
The building blocks of the LPI are time-series of either population size, density (population size per unit area), abundance (number of individuals per sample) or a proxy of abundance (for example, the number of nests recorded may be used instead of a direct population count). Data are sourced through systematic searches of scientific journals, keyword searches and querying online databases. The table below describes the full data inclusion protocol.
Table 1. Criteria for including data in the Living Planet Database.
If you have data you would like to contribute to the Living Planet Database, please email us.
What does the LPI Indicate?
The Living Planet Index (LPI) measures the average change in the size of wild populations of vertebrate species over time. The latest LPI shows a decline of 73%. This means that the size of these populations fell by, on average, 73% between 1970 and 2020. Below is a table of what the LPI shows, and some common misconceptions.
Table 2. A breakdown of what the LPI shows, accompanied by common misconceptions.
Are all the populations in the LPI declining?
LPI results are cumulative average trends in population size over time per chosen area and/or species group. This means that the rate of change isn't the same for each population within the index. In the case of the global LPI, some populations and species are faring worse than the average decline reported, whereas others are not declining as much or are increasing. In fact, approximately half the populations show a stable or increasing trend, and half show a declining overall trend.
As the number of populations that have positive and negative trends are more or less equal, this means that the magnitude of the declining trends exceeds that of the increasing trends in order to result in an average decline for the global LPI. Also, the location of declining populations will determine how much weight they are attributed in the global index. See the Technical Supplement for more detail on weightings.
Figure 1. Figure 3. The percentage of decreasing, increasing and stable populations (based on the total change during the course of the time-series) in the Living Planet Database 2026. Stable populations are defined as populations that change by less than 5% over the study period.
How are short time-series distributed across taxonomic groups?
The LPI database contains data gathered from different sources and collected at different scales, and not explicitly for the purpose of the analyses presented in the Living Planet Report. It therefore consists of time series of varying lengths (interval between the first and the last observation) and fullness (number of observations over the total number of years). For some species/groups, however, only shorter time-series are available, as shown in the figure below. Whilst time series for birds, mammals and fish are longer, amphibians are almost exclusively represented in the database by shorter time-series. Long-term data are often available for species/groups that are doing better on the whole.
Placing a strict threshold on the minimum length of the time-series or the minimum number of data points could therefore disproportionately impact some taxonomic groups, and often those that are already less well represented in the LPI.
Figure 2. The length (the interval between the first and the last observation) and completeness (percentage of years with an observation) of time-series in the Living Planet Database 2026 by taxonomic group. Modified from Mével et al. (in prep).
For more details on the LPI and the underlying dataset, please see the 2026 Technical Supplement.