What Do the First 597 Global Fungal Red List Assessments Tell Us about the Threat Status of Fungi?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for the interesting paper and congratulations on the work you have done.

Please find the detailed comments to your manuscript in the attached file.

With best regards

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I have been invited to review the manuscript “” for Diversity. This article reviews the first >500 Red List assessments of fungi and discusses about the implications of Red Listing species from these groups.

The manuscript is very interesting, complete and original. I would like to congratulate the authors for the great work summarizing information from assessments and presenting the way forward. The article clearly brings lots of important information on a sharp edge of RL expansion that is not yet available in the literature and in my view deserves great attention. On that note I must say that I am quite surprised that this is submitted to Diversity and believe that it would have deserved a journal with a wider conservation audience. That said, my recommendation for the editor is clearly to accept the paper after a few minor changes that I detail below. In addition to those, I think that it would be nice if the text can be a little bit reduced (some details may not be really needed) but I let the authors the choice of what to cut (if they believe this is relevant).

Major comment:

-          I have some issues with sections 3.4 and 3.5. While the previous section describes the distribution of assessments within taxonomic and growth form groups, sections 3.4 and 3.5 do only describes the distribution (of trophic guilds and geographically) of threatened and NT species. While I understand the will of authors to specifically point to the groups / regions where threatened species occur, this is quite frustrating for the reader because it does not enable to know if this is because of a sampling bias or because such species are more threatened. For instance, you show that 36% of threatened or NT species are Saprotrophs but we need to compare that number to the proportion of Saprotrophs in the assessments. For those both sections I suggest to include all species in pie-charts (so that we can visualise the sampling bias) and combine them with a barplot showing the proportion of threatened species in each group (this can maybe be combined in a single plot where you can visualise the distribution of each group in the assessments and the proportion of threatened species within each group). Also, I would prefer to see all those results for threatened species only (and not threatened + NT), which I think is more in line with the use that will be made of the Red List.

Minor comments:

L107-108: This is a bit short, you could expand a little bit on the influence of the Red List, especially stating that it also enables monitoring state of global biodiversity (and in that regard it’s very important that fungi are part of the story). You can look at Rodrigues et al. 2006 (https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0169534705003320), Stuart et al. 2010 (https://www.sciencemag.org/lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1188606), Williams et al. 2021 (https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12778), Betts et al. 2020 (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/cobi.13454)

L110-112: It would be good if you also mention NT

L116: Not clear to me what you mean here by “as well as threats” and I’m afraid it does not fit with the way RL uses “threats” (in the RL classification threats are agriculture / climate change / hunting… and these do not interact with criteria)

L134: Not clear what you mean here about “such lists”, is it National RL or something larger?

L172-179: This paragraph is quite redundant with the previous paragraphs and in my view does not bring any needed information. I would simply remove this paragraph and add in the previous ones some numbers regarding assessors (you give lots of detail about workshops but so far we have no idea how many assessors are present in the fungi groups, which is important to get an idea how quick the number of assessments can grow).

L213: Should it be “and the fact” rather than “and fact”?

Fig.1: Species names should be in italic + I would like to see the RL categories appear on the figure (you could have the category logo next to the letters above each picture). Ideally, we would like to see some threatened, some NT, some LC, some DD species.

Box 1: The rationale for using Criterion C2aii for Fomitiporia n. is not totally clear for me as no mention to the % of mature individuals in one subpopulation is made. Could you please clarify why this criterion is met? Also I would appreciate seeing a DD species in that box (perhaps it could even replace Fomitiporia which is quite similar to the first species in my opinion)

L241-243: Please provide the proportion of threatened vs NT separately (now it looks like NT is a threatened category which is not true). It would be better to have one sentence on threatened and one sentence on LC + NT + DD.

Fig.3 is very nice! I just have one comment (but feel free to ignore it), DD could be placed between VU and NT so that it becomes visible how uncertain is the proportion of threatened species (as DD could be threatened or not threatened). This would follow RL summary and statistics classic figure

L253: Personally, I would move section 3.8 on criteria here (just after discussing the categories), so that everything that is related to assigning categories comes first and then you can discuss the ecological / threats aspects. But this is just my taste. Also Fig.10 is very nice and informative, well done!

Section 3.4: It’s odd that you here only talk about the NT + threatened species while previous sections were on all species. As a result, we don’t know if e.g., the predominance of mutualists is due to the fact that these groups are more assessed or more threatened than others. I think you should include all species and, if you want to highlight something about NT/threatened species, add an indication of the proportion of threatened species per group.

Section 3.5: Same comments, it’s a big problem for me that you don’t disentangle where species are assessed vs where species are threatened.

Fig.7: I would suggest adding the number of DD species on the numbers you provide on top of each continent facet

L399-404: Another solution to provide a more systematic picture of extinction risk and its trends (perhaps better than comprehensively assessing a few groups) is through the Sampled RL index where you select a representative sample of species to be assessed. It would be nice to discuss it here and to know if this is something that is planned for fungi (I guess that would be very useful!). I now see that you mention and dismiss this solution L585-591. As this is the only way to provide a representative view of fungi extinction risk and its trends, I think you should discuss a bit more if an intermediate solution (some kind of representative sample but based on species that can be assessed) could be met.

L404: Could we get an idea of the number of assessments planned to be made in the next years? I think the RL 2030 strategical plan (not sure if it’s out yet) mentions something like 23k fungi species assessed: is that really the plan and is that realistic?

L405-422: Something that was very surprising to me in your results was that criterion B1 was not that common (while it’s often very dominant in groups that are quite poorly known). Could you elaborate a bit on that please?

L506: It is also perhaps not the objective of the RL to include unicellular species. I don’t know if a limit of the groups to be included has been made somewhere in Red List documents (e.g., saying that bacteria are not to be considered for Red Listing) but it would be interesting to know if a taxonomical boundary has been set somewhere.

L628-634: This is very interesting! I totally understand that you are not expecting any automated method to directly predict RL category. But could you imagine some automated analytic tools that could help you to estimate a few parameters? I don’t know if you heard of the sRedList initiative (see the description here: https://www.idiv.de/en/sredlist.html and their framing paper here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2021.12.002), but I guess that if you can imagine a few specific analyses (from occurrence data, land-cover data, climate data, or whatever) that could help you in the assessment process either by calculating some important parameters or prioritising species assessments, this team might pick and develop some of these ideas. So if you have a wish list of things that might be useful in your assessment process, it’s time to mention it!

L668-671: This deserves a little bit more of discussion in my opinion. The decade interval is presented as a possible interval that you have in mind but it is actually a (theoretical) rule of the Red List: every assessment should in principle be reassessed every ten years. It has been an issue for many groups (see eg Rondinini et al. 2014) and so maybe it would be good to have a few sentences to know how the fungi group is getting ready for this.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for reviewing and addressing my comments.

I find all those corrections sufficient for acceptance in the present form.

With best regards, and wishes of many citations,

Reviewer

Reviewer 2 Report

I am very satisfied with the authors changes and edits. I just have a couple of minor edits to add:

Box 1: Thanks for clarifying the text for Fomitiporia nubicola. Please correct “an” for “and” in “across no more than 100 sites an in one single sub-population”. I really like the additional DD species, please close this paragraph by a dot and not a comma.