From the article:

If the population is small to begin with, accidentally counting fewer animals has a more dramatic, negative effect on the population trend than accidentally counting more.

This seems sloppy or intentionally misleading. Studies like these need to be extremely self critical. Plants, Animal, Insects, etc. are definitely dying due to human activity. Studies like these put an easy target on skeptics (ignorant or malicious) to dismiss the entire problem.

And indeed the article mentions just this:

Young also mentioned that the “extinction denier” community … feeds off examples, real or not, that show that wildlife is doing better than we thought. That makes it ever more important for measures of biodiversity loss to capture examples of successful conservation.

Academia is broken, where citications are used as currency to further academic careers/funding. My question is how do we fight this? Are there real solutions to rigourous peer review (mostly) free from bias?