Do not log‐transform count data

Abstract

Summary: 1. Ecological count data (e.g. number of individuals or species) are often log‐transformed to satisfy parametric test assumptions. 2. Apart from the fact that generalized linear models are better suited in dealing with count data, a log‐transformation of counts has the additional quandary in how to deal with zero observations. With just one zero observation (if this observation represents a sampling unit), the whole data set needs to be fudged by adding a value (usually 1) before transformation. 3. Simulating data from a negative binomial distribution, we compared the outcome of fitting models that were transformed in various ways (log, square root) with results from fitting models using quasi‐Poisson and negative binomial models to untransformed count data. 4. We found that the transformations performed poorly, except when the dispersion was small and the mean counts were large. The quasi‐Poisson and negative binomial models consistently performed well, with little bias. 5. We recommend that count data should not be analysed by log‐transforming it, but instead models based on Poisson and negative binomial distributions should be used.