Abstract Environmental managers often use indicator taxa to monitor full biodiversity and hidden environmental factors. For identifying practical indicators from assemblage data collected in the field, it is crucial to remove irrelevant variation, which unfortunately is not a common practice. We demonstrate, based on field data from Estonian forests, (i) how an attractive indicator group of macrofungi, perennial polypores, loses its apparent indicator value when variation in study effort and conspicuous environmental factors have been reduced; (ii) that simply including survey effort variation is sufficient to create significant covariation between species richness of taxon groups, which has often been taken as a justification for indicator assignment. These results imply that standardizing study effort should become a requirement for any field study that reports indicator taxa based on covariance patterns. We encourage researchers to be explicit and critical about the practical value of indicator taxa when compared with direct measurement of habitat conditions.

中文翻译：

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根据组合模式分配指标类群：注意努力和目标！

摘要 环境管理者经常使用指标类群来监测完整的生物多样性和隐藏的环境因素。为了从现场收集的组合数据中识别实用指标，去除不相关的变化至关重要，不幸的是，这不是一种常见的做法。我们根据爱沙尼亚森林的实地数据证明，(i) 当研究工作的变化和显着的环境因素减少时，一个有吸引力的大型真菌、多年生多孔菌指标组如何失去其明显的指标值；(ii) 仅仅包括调查工作变化就足以在分类群的物种丰富度之间产生显着的协变，这通常被视为指标分配的理由。这些结果意味着标准化研究工作应该成为任何基于协方差模式报告指标类群的实地研究的要求。与直接测量栖息地条件相比，我们鼓励研究人员对指标类群的实用价值进行明确和批判。