Dear editor,

In the latest issue of Biodiversity and Conservation, Ambinakudige and Sathish compare tree diversity and composition in coffee farms and sacred forests in the Western Ghats of India (Biodivers Conserv (2009) 18:987-1000) (DOI).

As my own research has included sacred groves and now focuses on coffee agroforestry systems, I was delighted to see the announcement of this paper in the table of contents I received via e-mail.

When I read the paper, however, I wondered how the manuscript could have possibly passed the review process, as there are several issues with this paper, including several wrong scientific species names, incorrect citation, wrong methods, some very doubtful results and numerous typos.
For your convenience, I have listed these issues below ^{1 2}.

As I think of Biodiversity and Conservation as a ‘good journal’ in my field and would recommend other researchers to publish in it, I find it particularly disturbing to see a paper with, basically, an important message, published in such a bad shape after being reviewed.

With kind regards,
Raf Aerts
Division Forest, Nature and Landscape,
K.U.Leuven, Belgium

¹ Serious issues

• Wrong results
  p995 Fig 3 Species accumulation very doubtful, probably flawed:
  Individual based species accumulation curves (IBSAC) are typically negative exponential or Michaelis-Menten functions (for asymptotic SACs), or log-log or log-linear functions (for non-asymptotic SACs). See eg PNAS for examples and TP for a review on SAC forms.
  A linear SAC, as given in Fig. 3, must be the result of wrong data analysis. Moreover, IBSACs must by definition pass through (1,1), as a single individual can only belong to one species.

• Wrong methods
  p991 Species importance values are the sum of relative dominance (basal area) and relative density (stem number) in percentage, not the average of these values as used in this paper. Moreover, usually IV is calculated as the sum of relative density, dominance and frequency.
  Thus: p994 Table 1 species importance values incorrect

• Wrong species names (see www.ipni.org)
  p994 Table 1
  Mimisilon malabarica (incorrect) for Memecylon malabaricum (correct)
  (3 times)
  Spathodea companulata (incorrect) for Sphathodea campanulata (correct)
  (2 times)
  Species name Indica (incorrect) for indica (no capital I)
  p995
  Gravellia robusta (incorrect) for Grevillea robusta (correct)
  (2 times)
  G. robusata (incorrect) for G. robusta (correct)
  p997 Gravillea robusta (incorrect) for Grevillea robusta (correct)
  (3 times)

² Specific issues

• Wrong interpretation
  p995 P=0.089 is not significant

• Bad language and typos
  p990 ‘interspersped’
  p991 wrong URL for EstimateS
  p993 ‘t (line break) he’
  p995 ‘to in’
  p995 ‘be’ missing before ‘harvested’
  p996 Table 2
  Unredeem (incorrect) for ‘unredeemed’ (3 times)
  ‘scared grove’ (4 times)
  p996 ‘the there’
  p997 ‘though’ line break ‘out’
  p997 ‘insurance’ for ‘insure’
  p997 ‘alternative’ for ‘for alternatives’

• Wrong index names
  p991 Shannon’s diversity index is H’ (not H)
  p992 Shannon’s evenness is J, not j^i (what was meant was J’ but this is not the same as J, for which the formula is given)

• Inappropriate citation
  p990 Verbist et al. 2005 discusses coffee agroforestry, not sacred groves

• Unnecessary formulas
  p991 relative density, relative dominance, Shannon diversity
  p992 Shannon evenness, Simpson’s index and evenness
  These indices are standard and there is no need repeating the formulas.

• Reference list
  At least three authors should be mentioned before abbreviating with ‘et al.’