6533b835fe1ef96bd129f2a0

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Flawed Meta-Analysis of Biodiversity Effects of Forest Management

subject

description

It appears that the negative effect of forest managementon biodiversity has become an axiom. Whether the neg-ative effect, however, is a fact based on solid empiricalevidence is not self-evident. Most of the studies that ad-dress the issue suffer from a lack of geographic extentand taxonomic narrowness. Therefore, a synthesis draw-ing together results from the individual studies is direlyneeded. In their recent paper, Paillet et al. (2010) rise tothis challenge and present a formal pan-European meta-analysis of data from 49 papers representing 120 indi-vidual comparisons across 10 taxonomic groups. Theirsynthesis has the potential to be a landmark paper inecological research, but also to affect pan-European for-est policies and conservation prioritizations. In any meta-analysis, selection of studies to be included is critical forthe conclusions to be reliable, but in such a potentiallyhigh-profile contribution as the synthesis by Paillet et al.,a particularly high level of scrutiny of the data is calledfor. Here we draw attention to four major shortcomingsin Paillet et al. that undermine the conclusions of theirmeta-analysis.