Presence of Endangered Red-Crowned Parrots (Amazona viridigenalis) Depends on Urban Landscapes

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for your excellent contribution, please see attached file for minor comments/suggestions to improve your manuscript.

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Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

We appreciate very much the comments provided by Reviewer 1. You will find our response to your comments point by point below. We have also used highlights (in yellow) for the portions of the manuscript that we have changed in response to specific comments. Many changes are grammatical so we do not include the reviewer comments for those changes.

Response to reviewer 1 –

Reviewer Comment – “Consider taking out one „urban“ and make the title more concise: Presence of endangered Red-crowned Parrots (Amazona viridigenalis) depends on urban landscapes”

Response –Updated title to match suggested title – thanks for the suggestion!

Removed “can” and “synanthropic” from sentences 1 and 2 in abstract to match suggestion

Reviewer Comment – Not sure if „dependancy“ is the right word to use here, as it implies that it cannot thrive elsewhere?

Response to suggestion - We use the word dependency not as a binary, but as a clinal word – as in there are varying levels of dependency on urbanization for this species, even within in the US.

Replaced “;” with “:” in line 24

Reviewer Comment – This is too vage, give examples for similar species. Parrots?

Response - replaced “similar species” with “other synanthropic species”

Line 47 – replaced “synanthropic species” with “They”

Line 51 – replaced thriving with thrive

Line 59 – updated sentence to match suggestion

Reviewer Comment – After introducing this abbreviation please use it

Response to sentence edit - I generally try to avoid using acronyms to begin a sentence, so here we will use Species Distribution Models instead of SDM – the acronym will be used throughout the rest of the paper.

Reviewer Comment – Such as….please explain

Response - This sentence is just stating that, besides climatic data, other variables may be important and are more and more often being used in SDMs; we don’t feel explaining specific variables other modelers have used offers relevant information here; citations have been provided if readers are curious what others have used for their models.

Line 127 – updated to match reviewer edit

Line 143 – updated to match reviewer edit

Reviewer Comment – You may consider adding this citation as it deals with Amazon parrots

Response – added reference suggested by reviewer

Line 216 – updated to match reviewer edit

Table S2 – updated text to clarify where model performance standard definitions were derived

Table S3 – updated table to clarify individual variable definitions per reviewer recommendation

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors used environmental variables and ecological niche modelling to give a comprehensive analysis about distribution and potential suitable habitat of an endangered parrot species. In general, the manuscript is well organized, the data are high quaility, the model is correct and the results are good and solid. I am interested that urbanization may be a good driving force for species conservation.

Some suggestions:

1 why the distribution of species is discontinued?

2 what is the main diet of species? Is it possible that people might give provision？

The english wrting is good. 

Author Response

Thank you for the review and for the comments.

The distribution of the species is discontinuous for the same reasons that urbanization is discontinuous. These birds are generally introduced in urban areas and have a dependency on urban areas (at least in the USA); so the parrots distributions align closely with urbanization.

As far as diet, Amazona parrots have a wide range of food - they will eat flowers, cactus, fruits, nuts, buds, leaves etc. and this is likely part of their attachment to urban areas where many native and nonnative food sources are available (as we mention in the paper). Also, we mention that the birds do come to bird feeders (usually peanuts, but sometimes sunflower seeds as well), but this is more of a supplement rather than something the birds depend on.

Reviewer 3 Report

Interesting and good written article. 

I added a few suggestion, only. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We appreciate very much the comments provided by Reviewer 3. You will find our response to your comments point by point below. We have also used highlights (in yellow) for the portions of the manuscript that we have changed in response to specific comments.

Response to reviewer 3 -

Reviewer Comment – I expected that first the information should concern the current state, and then all predicted topics. Change 3.1. with. 3.2

Reviewer Comment - I suggest that these two sentences could be included into the paragraph 3.1. at the end. I'd like to read about pure data first and then the modeling results.

Response to first two comments - we updated the manuscript by swapping sections 3.1 and 3.2, and removed section 3.4 and included that information at the end of section 3.1.

Reviewer Comment - It seems to me that these two sentences contradict each other. "High percentage" vs. "only" 9%-23%.

Response -  the sentences do not contradict each other; the first sentence is referring to a high-percentage of habitat that is occupied, while the next sentence is referring to a low percentage of habitat that is unoccupied.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx