The effects of ants on pest control: a meta-analysis

Dataset and R codes of "The effects of ants on pest control: a meta-analysis" by Anjos et al. (2023). We searched for papers in Web of Science© and Scopus© databases using all available years up to 31st March 2021. We used the PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) protocol for paper search (Moher et al., 2000). We used the following key terms in our search: “ant” AND “biological” AND “control”. To complement our dataset, we searched for more studies in recent reviews (Anjos et al., 2021; Diamé et al., 2018; Drummond and Choate, 2011; Offenberg, 2015; Rosumek et al., 2009; Thurman et al., 2019; Trager et al., 2010; van Mele et al., 2008). We selected studies according to two criteria. Studies must have: (i) investigated ant effects on abundance of pests or natural enemies, or effects of ants on plant damage (i.e., damaged leaves or fruit, lost fruit or lost leaf area) or crop yield (i.e., fruit production and fruit biomass); (ii) experimentally evaluated the influence of ants by contrasting ant presence with ant exclusion (e.g., ants have been excluded using physical or chemical barriers) on agrosystems. Our initial search identified 2,682 studies (1207 in Web of Science© and 1475 in Scopus©) that were potentially appropriate for our review. Of these, 678 were eliminated because they were duplicates and 1953 because they were not about the subject of interest or they were not about studies that compared the ant presence and exclusion protocols (Supporting Information, Fig. S1). Then, after applying our initial inclusion criteria (i, ii), 52 studies from our search remained in our dataset (Supporting Information, Table S1). Overall, these studies provided 857 cases (gathered through effect size estimates) for our analyses