There was no criticism, it was just a statement of what the researchers did, but with a sneer. Criticism is when you come up with reasons why those surveys wouldn't be representative, not instead choosing to deal in the fud of a sarcastic tone posing as argument.
Were they suggesting that nothing short of a multibillion dollar survey of every forest in the entire world is a minimum requirement for writing a paper where you make educated guesses about what the data you have means? Were they suggesting that the forest surveyed was not representative in some way, and that adding surveys of forests that have those characteristics would give us a better idea?
Trick questions. They weren't suggesting anything other than suspicion.
it was just a statement of what the researchers did, but with a sneer.
Are you talking about me? There was no sneer. Stop projecting nonsense onto me.
The very broad claim made in the title is not really supported by the limited research cited. The thing is, it wouldn't even be that hard to cite other studies that establish a pattern supporting the claim, like what another commenter here did. But neither the author of this article nor you did that.
Yeah, but if that's used to draw a more general conclusion about populations in other forested areas, that's not good science, or journalism (more likely).
The tricky thing about science is that it only gets done by actually doing things…