I am working on a project that assesses the slope of the species area curve across multiple studies (right now I have 35 studies). I have slope values for all these studies and all of these slopes were generated from the same model structure. I do not have access to all the std. errors of the slopes or the correlation coefficients (about 60-70% of the studies). For some studies, I had to use their data to model my own model to get the slope value. These studies vary across ecosystems, habitat types, and sample sizes. However, they all focus on one group of organisms.
I ultimately want to compare slopes by ecoregions, temperature, etc. I am wondering if a meta-analysis approach is possible or necessary? I have seen studies that use and don't not use a meta-analysis but answer the same question. I have also talked to other colleagues in my field and they don't believe my project really calls for a meta-analysis.
