Bats of the Tunisian Desert: Preliminary Data Using Acoustic Identification and First Record of Taphozous nudiventris in the Country

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I read the manuscript entitled Preliminary data on bats of the Tunisian desert, acoustic identification and first record of Taphozous nudiventris in the country and it is well written, being an important piece to improve our knowledge about the distribution of bats in North Africa.. However, the text still needs some improvements. For example, the authors present the result for a Chi-Square, which is not described in the methods. This test was used to compare sampled locations; however, there needs to be a description of this in the objectives. Why didn't the authors use circular statistics to analyse the activity data? Why was the activity data not corrected to minutes after sunset before temporal activity analysis was performed? Authors should also indicate the local sunset time in Figures 3 and 4, as this will allow us to identify whether or not there is activity before this time. Another very relevant issue is that in several parts of the discussion, the authors only present results from other studies, leaving their results aside and not discussing their main findings. Therefore, the discussion should be reformulated.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript “Preliminary data on bats of the Tunisian desert, acoustic identification and first record of Taphozous nudiventris in the country”, proposed to inventory the bats of a region of Tunisian desert through acoustic survey and discuss the results in relation to bats echolocation characteristics. The study also registers a new bat specie for Tunisia. The study does what it proposes and agrees with the journal scope, however, some consideration and enhancements are need for publication in Diversity.

It is remarkable the low quality of plots (Figure 3 and 4). Besides the low graphic quality (low resolution) the type of plot is not the best for their data presentation, I suggest a line plot. The axes notations are very large and confusing. There are several forms to represent hours in x-axis better than the used. There are not axes labels. Another conceptual problem is the focus in night-time variation that is few explored in discussion and are not related with the aims o the study.

I think that the table 1 does not need to be in main text, can be in a supplementary material.

The echolocation characteristics of the passes have a central importance in the discussion, I think that the echolocation variables (ex. FMAXE, SF) and other acronyms (ex. CF/FM, QCF) should be well described in the methods, as well as the form that they were registered. I see that this information is disperse throughout text, but I think that they should be concentrated in the material and methods section.

L. 139. What statistical analysis?

L. 173. The statistical test result should be more complete. The authors should describe other parameters besides de p-value. The description of the statistical tests in the material and methods is very superficial and apparently the authors made a chi-square, which was not described in the method. I do not see, in the results, the use of the Kruskal test and the PCA described in the methods. These inconsistences made the manuscript confusing and should be corrected.

Attention for the standardization of the text format in the tables!

L. 305. What competition? This is not describe or analyzed in the remainder of the manuscript. I think that this discussion is unnecessary and displaced in relation to aims.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf