A systematic review of context bias in invasion biology

Abstract

The language that scientists use to frame biological invasions may reveal inherent bias—including how data are interpreted. A frequent critique of invasion biology is the use of value-laden language that may indicate context bias. Here we use a systematic study of language and interpretation in papers drawn from invasion biology to evaluate whether there is a link between the framing of papers and the interpretation of results. We also examine any trends in context bias in biological invasion research. We examined 651 peer-reviewed invasive species competition studies and implemented a rigorous systematic review to examine bias in the presentation and interpretation of native and invasive competition in invasion biology. We predicted that bias in the presentation of invasive species is increasing, as suggested by several authors, and that bias against invasive species would result in misinterpreting their competitive dominance in correlational observational studies compared to causative experimental studies. We indeed found evidence of bias in the presentation and interpretation of invasive species research; authors often introduced research with invasive species in a negative context and study results were interpreted against invasive species more in correlational studies. However, we also found a distinct decrease in those biases since the mid-2000s. Given that there have been several waves of criticism from scientists both inside and outside invasion biology, our evidence suggests that the subdiscipline has somewhat self-corrected apparent biases.

Neighbour tolerance, not suppression, provides competitive advantage to non‐native plants

“…We were not surprised by this as the bias in reporting and interpretation of the results towards significant negative effects has long been recognised among studies on species competition and invasion (Connell ; Warren et al . ). However, in contrast to the high sensitivity to extreme values of the methods used for detecting publication bias (the significance of the Egger's regression intercept was driven by roughly 6 and 3% of the ANNE and RNNE data respectively), our analyses were robust to potential outliers (Fig.…”

Invasive plants negatively impact native, but not exotic, animals

“…Similar to other studies of possible research bias (e.g., Hulme et al, 2013;Warren, King, Tarsa, Haas, & Henderson, 2017), we sought to provide a detailed census of the studies evaluating the effects of invasive plants on animals. We did this using descriptive statistics of the 77 bias studies, which include the 12 meta studies.…”

Rethinking the native range concept

“…If a species is found outside its native range, it is usually considered non-native, potentially invasive, and possibly troublesome (e.g., Carballo-Cárdenas 2015). This concern over where a species does not belong can generate a bias against non-native species (Peretti 1998;Warren II et al 2017), wherein, even in the instances where specialists cannot explain why they regard a species as non-native or even invasive within a given context, they oppose the presence of those species (Humair et al 2014).…”