Fig. 2: Probability density of the posterior trend estimates of the changes in univariate biodiversity metrics.

Shading represents the posterior probability of the mean slope estimate, corresponding to the 80%, 90% and 95% CIs from the hierarchical Bayesian models. Numbers indicate the numbers of studies and sites available for each metric. Abundance is the total number of individuals observed at each time point, richness is the number of taxa observed at each time point, rarefied richness represents the expected number of species to be seen for the minimum number of individuals observed in any year in the time series, coverage richness is the expected number of species if 80% of the assemblage had been surveyed, Shannon and Simpson diversity were converted to their effective number of species and evenness was calculated as the ratio between the inverse Simpson index and species richness. The dotted lines for abundance and richness represent the results based on only the 57 studies with full community data.