Large carnivores are believed to play a key role in determining ecosystem properties via trophic cascades. While the recovery of large carnivore populations is generally heralded as a conservation success story, the common assertion that such recoveries alter plant communities and other ecosystem properties is currently not supported by the standards of evidence expected in other scientific disciplines.

There have been very few replicated and controlled experiments documenting evidence for trophic cascades involving large carnivores, leaving a knowledge gap with crucial implications for ecology and wildlife conservation.

The absence of a mechanistic understanding of food web dynamics and weak inference in many studies combine to obfuscate the mechanisms underlying if and how large carnivores affect ecosystems.