Effect of cattle silvopastoral systems relative to treeless pastures on the diversity, richness, and abundance of macroinvertebrates

This comparison provides a supplementary vote count analysis for the article, “Meta-analysis shows overall benefits of cattle silvopastoral systems for biodiversity in fragmented forest landscapes,” submitted to the journal Ecological Applications. The meta-analysis examines the effect of silvopastoral systems (SPS) relative to treeless pastures and forests on three measures of biodiversity (species richness, abundance, and diversity) across seven taxa (birds, dung beetles, insects other than dung beetles, vertebrates, plants, soil bacteria and fungi, and soil macroinvertebrates). To do this, we calculated standardized effect sizes (log response ratios) that combine species richness, abundance, and diversity values reported in the 45 scientific documents included in our meta-analysis.

We use this ORKG comparison to conduct a simple vote count of SPS effects based on the values originally reported in these documents, focusing on the effect of SPS relative to treeless pastures on macroinvertebrates (n=30 contributions, referred to as effect sizes in the meta-analysis). Four contributions reported no effect of SPS on macroinvertebrate biodiversity compared with treeless pastures; three reported a positive effect; and three reported a negative effect. In the majority of cases (n=20), the original contribution lacked a corresponding comparative statistical analysis, as indicated by “NA” in the “outcome” row. Therefore, it is not possible to compare the vote count outcome with the meta-analysis, which showed that macroinvertebrate biodiversity was significantly higher in SPS compared to treeless pastures.