A Different Statistical Perspective on the Evaluation of Ecological Data Sets

Statistical significance varies depending on the sample size. Therefore, when the sample size is sufficient, even differences that affect the total variation very little may be statistically significant. For this reason, it is very important to report effect size measures that estimate the share of the difference between groups of samples in the total variation. This study aims to determine the most reliable effect size measures that can be used when evaluating data obtained from ecological studies. The three most popular effect size measures used in practice were compared in terms of their performance in 2700 different experimental conditions. For this purpose, random numbers generated from the multivariate Poisson distribution were used with the Monte Carlo simulation technique. As a result of the simulations, it was determined that Epsilon-squared and Omega-squared were quite unbiased estimators. Therefore, it was concluded that one of these two effect size measures should be reported in addition to the p-value when evaluating ecological studies.