Yefeng Yang, Malgorzata Lagisz, Shinichi Nakagawa 

Recently, Costello and Fox (2022) tested, with a large dataset, the hypothesis of whether there is a widespread decline effect in the discipline of ecology. In other words, the magnitude of the reported ecological effect sizes declines over time (Leimu and Koricheva 2004). Contrary to early results from much smaller datasets (Jennions and Møller 2002, Barto and Rillig 2012), Costello and Fox (2022), using 466 ecological meta-analyses with > 100,000 effect sizes, concluded that there was no systematic decline effect across the field of ecology – only ~5% of ecological meta-analyses showed statistical evidence of a decline effect. This conclusion seems to be “good news” and has important field-wide implications. For example, the temporal stability of the cumulative evidence can alleviate the concerns about policy-making for conservation and environmental management (Koricheva and Kulinskaya 2019).