The “Empty Forest” paradigm published three decades ago inspired studies on biodiversity erosion. Evidence to date continues pessimistic regarding the fate of wildlife. This calls for a more proactive approach by several societal actors to realign systems of resource exploitation with the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity. In late February 2022, we used the Scopus search engine separately using the keywords “defaunation” and “empty forest” to aggregate the number of scientific publications using these terms in the manuscript title, abstract, and keywords. We thus analyzed this dataset using descriptive statistics, such as the number of published papers, the author’s keywords, and a pictorial synthesis of the major effects of defaunation upon ecosystem functioning. Moreover, we briefly illustrate a pantropical overview on this topic by mapping defaunation trends (e.g. declines in species richness, abundance and population biomass) by selecting several key papers — using our extensive knowledge of this literature — and a wider geographic or long-term cover or large datasets documenting wildlife declines. We further derive estimates of proportional declines (richness, abundance, and biomass) by averaging (and SD) the major trends stated in these studies.

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