Patterns of mammalian population decline inform conservation action

1. Evaluations of wildlife population dynamics have the potential to convey valuable information on the type of pressure affecting a population and could help predict future changes in the population's trajectory. Greater understanding of different patterns of population declines could provide a useful mechanism for assessing decline severity in the wild and identifying those populations that are more likely to exhibit severe declines. 2. We identified 93 incidences of decline within 75 populations of mammalian species using a time-series analysis method. These included: linear, quadratic convex (accelerating) declines, exponential concave (decelerating) declines, and quadratic concave declines (representing recovering populations). Excluding linear declines left a dataset of 85 declines to model the relationship between each decline-curve type and a range of biological, anthropogenic, and time-series descriptor explanatory variables. 3. None of the decline-curve types were spatially ...