The climate warming stripes were created by Professor Ed Hawkins at the University of Reading in 2018. Climate change has been found to get up to eight times more coverage than biodiversity loss. Professor Miles Richardson (@findingnature) from the University of Derby created the biodiversity stripes in August 2022 and set up biodiversitystripes.info. Only by addressing both the warming climate and loss of wildlife do we stand a chance of passing on a stable planet for future generations.
The ‘biodiversity stripes’ provide a visual representation of the change in biodiversity over time, often since 1970. The highest level of biodiversity is coloured bright green. Lower levels move through yellow to grey, depending upon the level of decline. Darker greys appear with greater declines.
The original stripes used data from the Living Planet Index. This data tells us that the population of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles has seen an average drop of 69% globally since 1970. The global data includes over 30,000 populations of over 5000 species. The UK stripes use JNCC UK biodiversity indicators.
Use of the biodiversity stripes is encouraged but must include appropriate acknowledgement of biodiversitystripes.info and the source of the data. When based on LPI data, LPI’s preferred format is: LPI 2022. Living Planet Index database. 2022 www.livingplanetindex.org). Note that products derived from LPI data for financial gain are prohibited without written permission of ZSL and WWF. UK stripes should acknowledge Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, UK. 2021. UK Biodiversity Indicators 2021 and include the attribution statement “Contains public sector information from Defra, licenced under the Open Government Licence v3.0”.
The creator and licensor of the Forest Species Stripes is WWF-UK from ZSL/WWF (2022) Forest Specialist Index, 1970 to 2018 data and published as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Note that this product is not licenced for commercial use without written permission from WWF and ZSL
