Abstract
Species richness and total abundance are two of the most commonly used response measures in empirical studies of the effects of anthropogenic land-use on biodiversity, in spite of the fact that they are insensitive to changes in a range of community attributes. We evaluated the extent to which meta-analyses about the effects of forest land-use on ecological communities make use of gross species richness, diversity and abundance measures (hereafter low-informative measures) as opposed to more refined response variables conveying a higher degree of conservation-relevant information, e.g., by accounting for compositional or functional changes in the communities (high-informative measures). Nearly one-half of the 221 included meta-analyses were based solely on low-informative measures. The prevalence of low-informative measures was higher for meta-analyses belonging to studies encompassing a broad taxonomic scope and it has increased since 2002. Few differences were detected in the use of response measures among taxonomic groups, although there were indications that some better-known groups tended to be more often studied with high-informative measures. To provide guidance for future work, we synthesized the high-informative measures of biodiversity used in the reviewed studies. For better-informed meta-analyses, we encourage the use of more refined approaches to quantify impacts on communities in addition to species richness and total abundance measures. This may involve, for example, the use of β diversity and functional diversity measures, as well as separate analyses for different ecological groups or conservation status categories.
Highlights
An increasingly used analytical approach in conservation science is to synthesize the results of several primary studies through meta-analyses (Gurevitch et al 2018)
Our results show that nearly one-half of the meta-analyses focusing on the effects of anthropogenic actions on forest biodiversity have relied only on simplistic response measures that may give insufficient or even misleading descriptions of the changes occurring in ecological communities
The proportion of meta-analyses based on low-informative measures has been continuously increasing through time, in spite of the fact that several authors have acknowledged the limitations of species richness and total abundance as response measures (e.g., Anand et al 2010; Putz et al 2012; Duguid and Ashton 2013; Burivalova et al 2014; Chaudhary et al 2016)
Summary
An increasingly used analytical approach in conservation science is to synthesize the results of several primary studies through meta-analyses (Gurevitch et al 2018). Taxonomic richness of communities (e.g., local species richness) along with total community abundance (e.g., the total number of individuals in a community) are two of the most commonly used biodiversity measures in empirical studies addressing land-use impacts (Balvanera et al 2006; Dornelas 2010; Vellend et al 2013). This is in spite of the fact that species richness is insensitive to changes in a range of community attributes, such as changes in species composition (Supp and Ernest 2014; Lindenmayer et al 2015). Considering the widespread use of gross species richness and total community abundance as response measures in conservation ecology research (e.g. Balvanera et al 2006), there is an obvious risk that these overly simplistic response measures will be frequently used for meta-analyses
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