The effectiveness of spawning habitat creation or enhancement for substrate-spawning temperate fish: a systematic review

Table 4 Results of study validity assessment using the critical appraisal tool (see Table 1)

	High		Medium		Low
Study design	BACI	13	BA or CI	82	N/A	–
Replication at level of intervention	n > 5	5	n = 1–4	42	Unreplicated	48
Control matching	Well matched at site selection/study initiation	80	Moderately matched at site selection/study initiation	9	Poorly matched at site selection/study initiation	6
Measured outcome	Quantitative	79	Semi-quantitative or quantitative approximation	13	Qualitative	3
Confounding factors	Intervention and comparator sites are homogenous during study	74	Intervention and comparator sites moderately comparable with respect to confounding factors during study	10	Intervention and comparator sites hardly comparable with respect to confounding factors during study or lacking information to judge	11

Numbers indicates the number of projects that received the critical appraisal score for each criterion

ISSN: 2047-2382