Investigating Bat Activity in Various Agricultural Landscapes in Northeastern United States
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is an interesting piece of work that examined foraging/flight activity by bats - an underappreciated group of insect predators. By and large, the paper is well written and relatively easy to follow. My primary concern is with how the authors present the data/results. There is no measure of variation presented with most of the data only being presented as means. These 'Standard Error of Means' absolutely need to be incorporated into the manuscript.
There are also changes needed in Figure 3 - my version only shows two categories of bats (one of which is 'unidentified') but there are six species listed for the graph.
I suggest putting the data that is currently a 'Supplemental Table' directly into the text.
Also, there are some structural changes that are needed in the text.
I have placed all of my comments on the attached copy of the manuscript.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
- Thanks so much for your kind complements about our manuscript and for taking the time to review it. We have now provided standard error of means in all tables and standard error bars in all figures.
- I am not sure what happened to the document I submitted earlier. Our attached reviewed manuscript addresses the concern you raised. There are actually five species and not six species as erroneously indicated in the previous version. We deleted the sixth species that had 0%. The five species and their relative proportions are marked with different colors in the pie chart
- We have moved the Supplementary table to text – it is now Table 2.
- We have addressed the other suggestions that you indicated in the text in Track Changes in the attached revised manuscript.
- Again, we are very grateful to you for taking the time to review our manuscript
Reviewer 2 Report
Harms and coauthors reported a study regarding the bat activity in various agricultural landscapes in North Eastern United States.
The manuscript is well organized and written. Just few suggestions:
Line 49. “over 150 million hectares”. Please add a reference.
Line 56. Add a reference.
I suggest to reduce the Introduction section, focusing on the study carried out.
Lines 174-181. I suggest to move this part at the end of the Introduction section.
Author Response
- Thanks so much for your kind complements about our manuscript and for taking the time to review it.
- We have provided references to Line 49 and line 56 as you suggested
- We have also reduced content and revised the Introduction to focus on the study carried out.
- We have moved line 174-181 describing our statistical analysis procedure to Materials and Methods section.
- We have addressed the other suggestions that you indicated in the text in Track Changes in the attached revised manuscript.
- Again, we are very grateful to you for taking the time to review our manuscript.
