What you should know about this data

The Living Planet Project – which produces the Living Planet Index – is led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Every two years, a new Living Planet Index report is published. This presents the latest high-quality data we have on animal populations, but also increases in global coverage with every new release.

The underlying data included in the Living Planet Index comes from a combination of published scientific articles, online databases, and government reports.

The Living Planet Index aggregates observations on changes in population size, and similar metrics, across tens of thousands of animal populations. Its 2024 report included figures across 34,000 wildlife populations. This captures everything from frogs to elephant species, rhinos to owls, from every continent on Earth. But even 34,000 populations are only a small fraction of the world’s wildlife.

This data is not globally representative: some regions have much more data available than others. Biodiversity data is much more limited in the tropics, for example.

The Living Planet Index only includes figures on vertebrate species – mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians. It does not include insects, corals, fungi, or plants.

Its final index is the average change in population size across all of the included animal populations. This figure is not representative of every population and is sensitive to outliers.