trend

The general direction in which the structure or dynamics of a system tends to change, even if individual observations vary.

A general development or change in a situation or in the way that people are behaving.

temporal trends are directional long-term changes (i.e., decades to centuries) in numbers of species, populations or individuals introduced, or the spatial extent of colonization (Buckland et al., 2017). In this assessment report, trends are presented as indicators of species numbers (species richness) and rates of accumulation of species (e.g., first records of a species in a given location) over time.