ReviewEcology and evolution2021
Measuring temporal patterns in ecology: The case of mast seeding.
Review in Ecology and evolution, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed, 15 citations in OpenAlex.
- Prior pathogen exposure augments inter-individual heterogeneity in antibody levels and reinfection loads in a songbird-pathogen system.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Identifying fish populations prone to abrupt shifts via dynamical footprint analysis.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Temporal complexity of terrestrial ecosystem functioning and its drivers.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Forest Age Rivals Climate to Explain Reproductive Allocation Patterns in Forest Ecosystems Globally.Ecology letters · 2025Review
- Reinfection with a Bacterial Pathogen Augments Heterogeneity in Host Disease Responses.Research square · 2025Article
- Spatiotemporal variation of chasmogamy and cleistogamy in a native perennial grass: fecundity, reproductive allocation and allometry.AoB PLANTS · 2023Article
- Article
- Tree hazards compounded by successive climate extremes after masting in a small endemic tree, Distylium lepidotum, on subtropical islands in Japan.Global change biology · 2021Article
- Measuring temporal patterns in ecology: The case of mast seeding.Ecology and evolution · 2021Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Properly assessing temporal patterns is a central issue in ecology in order to understand ecosystem processes and their mechanisms. Mast seeding has traditionally been described as a reproductive behavior consisting of highly variable and synchronized reproductive events. The most common metric used to measure temporal variability and thus infer masting behavior, the coefficient of variation (CV), however, has been repeatedly suggested to improperly estimate temporal variability. Biases of CV estimates are especially problematic for non-normally distributed data and/or data sets with a high number of zeros.Some recent studies have already adopted new metrics to measure temporal variability, but most continue to use CV. This controversy has started a strong debate about what metrics to use.We here summarize the problems of CV when assessing temporal variability, particularly across data sets containing a large number of zeros, and highlight the benefits of using other metrics of temporal variability, such as proportional variability (PV) and consecutive disparity (
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.