Terrestrial Carnivore Trophic Cascade Effects Across Biomes

113 studies reveal a substantial overall cascading effect from terrestrial large carnivores, with a mean lnRR of 1.10. The meta-analysis, authored by Weilin Zhu and last updated in April 2026, demonstrates these top-down effects are strongest in arid, low-productivity environments.

Use Cases

• Analyze the relationship between effect size (lnRR) and environmental variables like precipitation and vegetation growth.
• Compare reported effect sizes from observational studies versus experimental manipulations to assess methodological bias.
• Investigate geographic skew by filtering studies focused on North American or Australian canids.
• Model how the strength of trophic cascades varies across biomes using study-level metadata.

Strengths

• Synthesizes data from 113 individual studies.
• Provides a global analysis across diverse terrestrial biomes.
• Explicitly compares effect sizes from different research designs (observational vs. experimental).

Limitations

• Evidence base has a pronounced geographic skew towards North America and Australia.
• Taxonomic focus is disproportionately on canids.
• The dataset is small at 86.9 KB, limiting detailed analysis of raw study data.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Meta-analysis synthesizing published ecological studies.

Freshness

Last updated in April 2026.

Geography

Global, but with noted geographic skews.