en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biologically_diverse

The cited Mora et al. (2011) paper does not say there are 8.7 million terrestrial species plus 2.2 million oceanic species.

What the paper actually reports is:

• about 8.7 million eukaryotic species globally; and
• about 2.2 million of those are marine.

That implies the non-marine share is roughly 6.5 million on land, not 8.7 million terrestrial species.

The paper’s abstract states that it predicts “∼8.7 million … eukaryotic species globally, of which ∼2.2 million … are marine.” A contemporaneous summary from the Census of Marine Life likewise states the estimate as 8.7 million total, with 6.5 million on land and 2.2 million in oceans.

So the article has swapped the paper’s global total into the terrestrial slot, inflating the land estimate by about 2.2 million.

This sentence misstates what WWF’s Living Planet Report found.

The 2016 WWF report’s headline metric is the Living Planet Index (LPI). WWF describes that result as an average decline in vertebrate population abundance (or wildlife population sizes), not an absolute loss of “the planet’s biodiversity.”

Specifically, WWF’s 2016 report states that from 1970 to 2012 the LPI shows a 58% overall decline in vertebrate population abundance. That is a statistical average across monitored vertebrate populations. It is not the same as saying Earth has lost 58% of all biodiversity, and not an “absolute” measure of biodiversity loss.

Independent explanations of the LPI make this distinction explicit: the index does not tell us the number of individuals, species, or populations lost. So this sentence overstates and misdescribes the underlying source.

This sentence appears to contain a unit error.

Authoritative forest statistics report that the world’s forests cover about 4.06 billion hectares (roughly 10 billion acres), which is about 31% of Earth’s land area. The article instead says 4 billion acres while also calling that “nearly a third” of Earth’s land mass.

Those two quantities do not match. Four billion acres is only about 1.62 billion hectares, far short of one-third of global land area. The commonly cited figure for roughly one-third of land area is about 4 billion hectares, not acres.

This date is inconsistent with standard geologic accounts of Madagascar’s breakup history.

Credible references describe Madagascar as separating from Africa roughly 160–165 million years ago as Gondwana broke apart. A later breakup — around 88 million years ago — refers to Madagascar becoming isolated after separating from the Indian subcontinent, not from Africa.

So the sentence incorrectly attributes a 66 million years ago date to Madagascar’s separation from mainland Africa. That date is off by many tens of millions of years and also conflates two different tectonic separations.

This sentence gives Indonesia a population that is tens of millions too low.

The World Bank’s country data page for Indonesia lists 283,487,931 as the country’s total population in 2024. That is over 43 million higher than “nearly 240 million.”

Because the sentence is written in the present tense and does not date the figure, it currently misstates Indonesia’s population by a very large margin.

This sentence drops an important qualifier.

UN and FAO sources describe forests as home to most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity — for example, about 80% of land-based species or the majority of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. That is different from saying forests contain 80% of all biodiversity worldwide.

Without the word terrestrial (or an equivalent qualifier like land-based species), the statement overstates forests’ share by implying that this percentage includes marine biodiversity as well.