Publication bias
The funnel plots show the asymmetry in the data (discussed further below), particularly in the case of land-use intensification (Figure S5). In addition, in the data for the main model, as well as the data for the models focused on the stressors of land-use intensification, nutrient enrichment, and to a lesser extent climate change, there is a lack of small effect sizes that have high precision (i.e., the tip of the funnel) (Figure S5).
Discussion :
We examined a wide array of GCs across all soil fauna, and in doing so, we identified that pollution and land-use intensification had the greatest negative impacts on soil fauna communities. Climate change also had a negative, albeit smaller, impact, although after adjusting for biases within the publications, this significant effect was lost. For GCs where environmental stressor was a significant predictor, there was no strong indication that press stressors had greater impact on biodiversity, except in the case of land-use intensification. Overall, the effect of the GCs did not vary with context, as there was no effect of habitat type on the estimate, and rarely was there an effect of the different body size classes. Studying the impact of pollutants may not be possible with aboveground organisms, due to the lack of primary studies focussed on pollutant impacts , but by focusing on soil biodiversity, we are able to understand how detrimental environmental pollution is relative to all other GCs. The only GC that comes close is land use intensification.