Monitoring vertebrate abundance in Austria: developments over 30 years

Loss of biodiversity is one of the major challenges of the anthropocene. Various indices are used to quantify biodiversity. For vertebrates, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) uses the Living Planet Index (LPI). It is calculated globally as well as separately for the species occurring in terrestrial, freshwater, and marine biomes. Action to prevent biodiversity loss can be taken by countries or provinces, so it is important to understand the changes in biodiversity at local scales. We present LPIs for vertebrates in Austria, both unweighted and weighted, according to species richness. Vertebrate populations seem to have declined strongly in Austria, and their abundance was stabilized at about 60% of the initial population size in the base year 1990—the LPI declined from 1 in 1990 to ~0.6 (unweighted) or ~0.7 (weighted) in 2015. This is almost double the global decline for the same period. LPIs were calculated separately for the terrestrial biome (~0.6), the freshwater biome (~0.9), birds (~0.7), and native species (~0.6). These indices give evidence that conservation measure to halt biodiversity loss in Austria is necessary and show where more data are needed. In Austria, more research is needed especially on populations of reptile species.