Assessing sensitivity and robustness of the Living Planet Index
Group Leaders: Valentina Marconi (Zoological Society of London) & Jessica Currie (WWF-Canada)
Date of Working Group: June 3-7, 2024
In person location: Centre for Social Innovation, Toronto
Deadline: February 6, 2024
Apply here : https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6GdxtswFzH2eo5M
The Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution, as part of its NSERC-CREATE Living Data Project, is now accepting applications for graduate students who wish to participate in the following working group. Students will gain valuable experience in synthesis science, have the opportunity to co-author publications, and may be eligible for two course credits. Students must be currently registered in a graduate program in ecology, environmental science, evolution or a related discipline in a Canadian university. Students should either be enrolled in a CIEE or BIOS2 member university, or they or their supervisor must be a current CSEE member. The highest priority will go to students who have already taken the Living Data project courses “Synthesis statistics for ecology and evolution” and “Scientific collaboration in ecology and evolution” or who will take these courses in fall 2024. Together with these two courses, participation in this working group will fulfil most of the requirements for a CIEE Certificate in Synthetic and Collaborative Science. Students who have participated in a previous Living Data Project working group are ineligible.
The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a global biodiversity indicator calculated as the geometric mean of annual changes in vertebrate species abundance. The LPI is listed as a component indicator for monitoring progress towards Goal A and Target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted during the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The dataset behind the index currently includes over 38,000 time-series for over 5,000 species. This working group will be investigating the robustness of the indicator and its sensitivity to different methodological choices such as a) different treatments of zero values in the time-series, b) sensitivity to outliers, temporal representation and short or sparse time-series s, and c) different ways to calculate confidence intervals around the index to communicate uncertainty. As the applicability of indicators at the national level is key for their use in reporting in the policy context, we will also be applying the above-mentioned sensitivity tests to the Canadian disaggregation of the index, based on a comprehensive dataset for Canadian vertebrates used to calculate the Canadian Species Index, one of the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators, as well as the Canadian LPI. The results of this research will be published on an online platform in the form of a Shiny application and will be submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed open-access journal to reach conservation practitioners and policymakers. Working group participants will be invited to be co-authors on the manuscript.
This working group is co-sponsored by World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF-Canada).
Date of Working Group: June 3-7, 2024
In person location: Centre for Social Innovation, Toronto
Deadline: February 6, 2024
Apply here : https://ubc.ca1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_6GdxtswFzH2eo5M
The Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution, as part of its NSERC-CREATE Living Data Project, is now accepting applications for graduate students who wish to participate in the following working group. Students will gain valuable experience in synthesis science, have the opportunity to co-author publications, and may be eligible for two course credits. Students must be currently registered in a graduate program in ecology, environmental science, evolution or a related discipline in a Canadian university. Students should either be enrolled in a CIEE or BIOS2 member university, or they or their supervisor must be a current CSEE member. The highest priority will go to students who have already taken the Living Data project courses “Synthesis statistics for ecology and evolution” and “Scientific collaboration in ecology and evolution” or who will take these courses in fall 2024. Together with these two courses, participation in this working group will fulfil most of the requirements for a CIEE Certificate in Synthetic and Collaborative Science. Students who have participated in a previous Living Data Project working group are ineligible.
The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a global biodiversity indicator calculated as the geometric mean of annual changes in vertebrate species abundance. The LPI is listed as a component indicator for monitoring progress towards Goal A and Target 4 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted during the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity. The dataset behind the index currently includes over 38,000 time-series for over 5,000 species. This working group will be investigating the robustness of the indicator and its sensitivity to different methodological choices such as a) different treatments of zero values in the time-series, b) sensitivity to outliers, temporal representation and short or sparse time-series s, and c) different ways to calculate confidence intervals around the index to communicate uncertainty. As the applicability of indicators at the national level is key for their use in reporting in the policy context, we will also be applying the above-mentioned sensitivity tests to the Canadian disaggregation of the index, based on a comprehensive dataset for Canadian vertebrates used to calculate the Canadian Species Index, one of the Canadian Environmental Sustainability Indicators, as well as the Canadian LPI. The results of this research will be published on an online platform in the form of a Shiny application and will be submitted for publication to a peer-reviewed open-access journal to reach conservation practitioners and policymakers. Working group participants will be invited to be co-authors on the manuscript.
This working group is co-sponsored by World Wildlife Fund Canada (WWF-Canada).