A Fractal Analysis of Biodiversity: The Living Planet Index

The Living Planet Index (LPI) is a global index which measures the state of the world’s biodiversity. Analyzing the LPI solely by statistical trends provides, however, limited insight. Fractal Regression Analysis is a recently developed tool that has been successfully applied in multidisciplinary scientific contexts for time series analysis. This method is based on the construction of a fractal function tailored to the dataset from which directional coefficients, representing trends, and fractal coefficients, representing oscillations, may be computed. These coefficients allow us to classify the world’s regions according to the progression of the LPI, helping us to identify and mathematically characterize the region of Latin America and Caribbean and the category of freshwater as worst-case scenarios with respect to the evolution of biodiversity.