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Table 1 The eligibility criteria for article screening for the study question

From: Are small protected habitat patches within boreal production forests effective in conserving species richness, abundance and community composition? A systematic review

Question elements

Eligibility criteria

Populations

Included

Boreal forests in Canada, Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and USA (dominant tree species in the study area must be spruce or pine)

Intervention

Included

Conservation of woodland key habitats

Conservation of the small protected forest patches, e.g. voluntarily conserved small areas (METSO and Komet programs) and certification-based protection

Excluded

Conservation of large protected areas, i.e. national parks, nature reserves, wilderness areas

Comparators

Included

Managed forests (production forests of all type, age and succession stage)

Natural forests (including national parks and other large-scale protected areas and, also, non-protected natural forests)

Also, SPHPs in natural and production forests can be compared to each other

Excluded

Small protected habitat patches different from intervention (for example WKHs and voluntary set-asides are not compared)

Different small protected habitat patches within the intervention (for example stream-side WKHs and herb-rich WKHs not compared)

Managed forest known to have low/high conservation values (for example areas not accepted in METSO program, forest areas receiving environmental subsidy)

Non-forest lands

Urban parks

Wooded fields e.g. Christmas tree plantations

Outcomes

Included

Species diversity

Species richness

Species abundance

Assemblage

Volume of deadwood

Diversity of deadwood

Excluded

All data on non-terrestrial species

Density of ant mounds / predator bird nests

Study design

Included

Control-intervention field studies of small habitat patches

Control-intervention studies of small habitat patches where no field study was conducted but the data analysed are originally from a field study

Excluded

Simulation/modelling studies (even partly simulated/modelled)

Habitat selection studies

Studies first mapping/finding species and afterwards checking whether the place of occurrence was located in SPHP or not

Language

Included

English

Finnish

Swedish

Russian