DOI: 10.5061/dryad.ffbg79cxt
title: Literature review dataset on predation-risk effects

description: A well-accepted narrative in ecology is that prey modify traits to reduce
 predation risk, and the trait modification has costs large enough to cause
 ensuing demographic, trophic and ecosystem consequences, with implications
 for conservation, management, and agriculture. But ecology has a long
 history of emphasizing that quantifying the importance of an ecological
 process ultimately requires evidence linking a process to unmanipulated
 field patterns. We suspected that such process-linked-to pattern (PLP)
 studies were poorly represented in the predation risk literature, which
 conflicts with the confidence often given to the importance of risk
 effects. We reviewed 29 years of the ecological literature which revealed
 that there are well over 4000 articles on risk effects. Of those, 349
 studies examined risk effects on prey fitness measures or abundance (i.e.,
 non-consumptive effects) of which only 26 were PLP studies, while 275
 studies examined effects on other interacting species (i.e., trait
 mediated indirect effects) of which only 35 were PLP studies. PLP studies
 were narrowly focused taxonomically and included only 3 that examined risk
 effects on unmanipulated patterns of prey abundance. Before asserting that
 risk effects drive ecological community dynamics, more attention must be
 given to examining whether risk-effect processes influence unmanipulated
 field patterns across diverse ecosystems. 
description: Our search was composed of three sub-searches encompassing
 1990-2018 (29 years). In the first sub-search, we scoured the literature
 using prominent risk-effect terms in Web of Science (All Databases;
 Supporting Information S2) which yielded 4013 publications. One author
 made a first pass through the papers by reading the titles, and abstracts
 if necessary, to eliminate papers that clearly did not meet the criteria;
 many were not ecological or were using the search terms to describe
 different processes (as in Box 2 in Peacor et al. 2020). From the reduced
 list, pairs of authors reviewed each paper independently according to the
 decision rules, and thereafter met to reconcile their scores.
 Disagreements were passed along and considered by a third member of the
 team. Finally, the lead author, SDP, reviewed all results with special
 attention to any that had disagreements or flagged concerns. In this final
 scoring, difficult papers were discussed among everybody that had reviewed
 the paper. For approximately 20 papers, when there was a clear question on
 methodology that we could not discern in the paper, we sought input from
 the authors of the reviewed paper for clarification. In the end, each
 paper in the reduced list was examined by 3-4 authors with closer
 examination given to papers that made it further along the decision
 tree. For figure 2, the date represented in panel A
 concern  #NCE (nonconsumptive effects),
 TMIEs (Trait-mediated indirect effects), either (TMIE or NCEs), and total
 Ecology papers, identified for each year. The three year average
 calculation provided.  Data normalized by dividing by
 the total provided. Please see methods of article for further
 information. In Figure 2, the data
 represented in panels B-D is the number of PLP studies identified that
 examined fitness components. This is given for NCE and TMIE studies.
 Please see text for description of the categories.  E.g. "PLP -
 Fitness component" is explained there. In Figure
 3, data concern the number of PLP studies that had different fitness
 components as a response measured, for NCE and TMIE studies. 
 In Figure 4, data concern number of total studies
 ("All") and PLP studies that had a given taxa as the prey
 species, for NCE and TMIE studies.  The figure presents % of total, and
 those percents also provided. A data tab contains a
 list of studies that were identified as PLP studies, and whether the prey
 was Invertabrate or vertabrate, the prey taxa, whether the study looked at
 a fitness measure, population growth rate or abundance,  and the fitness
 correlate measured if there was one.  (Same information provided in
 supplementary material S4)
description: Excel