Systematic Review of the Roost-Site Characteristics of North American Forest Bats: Implications for Conservation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Refreshing to read a well-reasoned, well-written and USEFUL paper for a change.  Kudos to the authors. I have just a few comments:

21-22 - what about landscape / forest stand stuff such as community type, stand age, topographic position, etc.?

53 - reword to say still being impacted

215 - double-check, for example in West Virginia you use data on MYSO and MYSE through 4 citations and each were separate stand-alone studies, so your tallies might not be correct for other states

248 - perhaps somewhere in document you should note that canopy cover % is often misleading in bat research. Many times taken below the roost under shade when in fact the roost is high up and exposed.

407-416 - disagree somewhat.  Look at T. Carter's note in JWM about flood/fire as necessary component to MYSO day-roosting areas.  In my experience, here's where MYSO and MYSE diverge.  MYSE seem to be in mid- to older-aged forests whereas MYSO almost always seem to be in stands impacted by recent disturbance, i.e.., flooding in the Midwest, fire in the Appalachians and Piedmont, or insect attack in the Coastal Plain. And there is sharp contrast to the stand conditions between where MYSO and MYSE roost even within the same localized area.

458 - italicize Perimyotis subflavus

Author Response

Thank you for the review. Please see the attachment for responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I think this is a good study that addresses an important question. Given the concerns about decline in bat species, finding ways to try and provide protection to a large number of species at one time is a good idea. I think this study provides a good starting point for identification of potential umbrella species as well as finding areas where more research is needed. Overall, the methodology seems appropriate and it was generally clear, but there were some minor areas where I think additional explanation/information would be helpful to the reader. In the discussions on lines 167-175, the authors address the problem of missing values in their dataset. I think this explanation needs a little more context for the reader to judge it – for example, how many times was this procedure necessary – there is a specific mention that this procedure didn’t work for one species, but it isn’t clear how often it was used. Based on the data, it’s likely that this was done more often for variables like roost height that were reported less often, which might affect confidence in the reliability of those variables, especially if some species were more likely to be missing that variable than others. Obviously with this kind of study there is no way to remove those variables without dramatically reducing the data set, and I think this method was reasonable, but it is important to address that potential shortcoming.

The writing was easy to read and doesn’t seem to need any major changes for grammar spelling. However, on line 458, Perimyotis subflavus isn’t italicized. It seemed like all other use of species names were italicized correctly.

The other issues were with some of the figures and the use of color and/or lack of full explanation. For figure 3, use of slight variations in grayscale coloration is a little hard to discriminate. Given that the other figures make use of full color, it seems this figure should take advantage of this as well, using different colors for each level or putting markers in the appropriate states to indicate the number of studies.

Figures A1 and A2 were overall understandable, but there were some issues with clarity. In both cases there are gaps between some of the slices on the graph that aren’t labeled, so it isn’t clear what those mean. Perhaps these are species that had very low percentages, but this isn’t clear from the explanation or caption. In addition, some of the color differences are clear (e.g., deciduous vs. coniferous on A1) but the subtle shading differences are not. Why are some deciduous trees brown while others are more of a reddish color? In the case of A2, the colors might correspond to the genus, but the subtle shading seems to indicate that some of the species are closer or more similar in some way, but this isn’t explained in the caption or text.

In figure A3, the au values are explained in the caption and in the text, but the bp and edge # are not. These may be clear based on the method used for making the dendrogram, but they should have a short explanation in the caption and/or text to explain what those numbers mean.

Author Response

Thank you for the review. Please see the attachment for responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf