Modeling Dynamic Processes in the Black Sea Pelagic Habitat—Causal Connections between Abiotic and Biotic Factors in Two Climate Change Scenarios

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Reviewing of the manuscript ‘Modelling dynamic processes in the Black Sea pelagic habitat-casual connections between abiotic and biotic factors in two climate change scenarios’ submitted by L. Lazar et al. to the journal sustainability.

 

This work uses the Machine Learning (ML) methods to investigate the planktonic dynamics in the northwestern coast and adjacent water regions of the Black Sea, combining with the 10-year long observations. The considered environmental parameters include the water temperatures, salinity, and nutrient (e.g., Nitrogen), and the normal climate scenario and RCP2.6 in 2042. I think this work is essential and fit for the journal, and my Recommendation is Minor Revision before it can be published. Still, I have a couple of comments that the authors need to address and clarify.

 

1.       In the start of each section, it would be better adding the common name of the species Noctiluca scintillans, is that dinoflagellate?

2.       In the Introduction, the literature reviews need to be improved, and it needs to stress the study limitations of previous works, and how this work fill the research gap of previous studies? In addition, the novelty of this work or the advantages of the machine learning (ML) technique used herein compared with other works should be indicated. How does this work differ from other ML work and method?

3.       The last paragraph or sentence in the Introduction is overly long. Suggest breaking it into several short sentences.

4.       At page 3 line 132, ‘ie’ -> ‘i.e.’.

5.       Results. Page. 4 in Line 170, ‘ …… with values lower than 6.06%o being uncharacteristic (outliers)’. Why are those values lower than 6.06 considered to be outliers? Could these ‘outliers” be also real values of observations?

6.       The figure quality needs to be improved, especially Fig. 3, in which the texts are hard to identify. Would Fig. 6 be necessary? The information in this figure is overly crowded.

7.       Fig. 8, 9 ,10, 11, 12. When comparing the normal and RCP2.6 scenarios, would that be more informative using the same sub-range/scale for colorbar between the left panel and right panel in each figure?

8.       Page 14. ‘A comprehensive approach to improving water quality ……’. Please align with other paragraphs at the start of this paragraph.

9.       Discussion. Please do a more detailed and in-depth analysis of the mechanisms that how the water temperature, salinity, and nutrient influence the zooplankton/phytoplankton dynamics.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We wanted to express our gratitude for your insightful feedback. The suggested changes have been implemented in the updated paper. Your valuable input greatly contributes to our project's success.

Thank you for your collaboration and ongoing support.

Best regards,

The Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In this work, the authors introduced a user-friendly modelling approache to analyze how abiotic factors influence various trophic levels within the marine ecosystem, both naturally and through human impact. They pecifically investigates the connections between environmental parameters (like temperature, salinity, and nutrients) and plankton along the Romanian Black Sea coast during the warm season (May-September) over a decade. The topic is original and relevant in the field of marine sustainability and it address a specific gap in the field. Compared with other published materials, it coupled two approaches (semi-quantitative modelling Mental Modeler, and statistical methods machine learning algorithms) to assess the natural variability and anthropogenic impact of the relationships between abiotic factors and the first two trophic levels of the marine ecosystem. As a whole, this manuscript is well organized, and I suggest a minor revision. Some points need to be considered before publication are suggested as follows:

(1) The authors are suggest to provide a flowchart of their research procedure and methods.

(2) some figures are lack of y-axis title. For example, Figure 2. 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We wanted to express our gratitude for your insightful feedback. The suggested changes have been implemented in the updated paper. Your valuable input greatly contributes to our project's success.

Thank you for your collaboration and ongoing support.

Best regards,

The Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for your effort to write this paper. I read throughout the manuscript and have some discussions to improve quality of manuscript as follow:

1.     In terms of the information sources, you should show more diverse references and information sources. High qualified journal papers and official instructions as well as international regulations should be the cited references. How could you prove for the reliability of the data set? As written in the journal sample, the data was collected from 2008 to 2018, except 2012, and consisted of 39 stations. The explanatory variables were collected during 2008-2018, this is almost 5 years ago, so some of the indicators might no longer correct right now, especially after the COVID 19 pandemic, with the block down and quarantine continuously as well as the temporarily stopped for almost two years (2020-2021), the amount of toxic emission released, the frequency of ship in and out was changed as well, so the properties of the Black Sea also be changed. In addition, the collected time was from May to September, so was it collected randomly at any time without consideration about the tide level, the average amount of monthly raining water? And, one more thing, how about the period of time from 2018 until 2022? Did you also collect data during this period of time? If yes, it would be better to combine here in order to see the continuous tendency of the dataset.      

2.  In terms of the CI and CR values, those values needed to be shown in the results part. Normally, for a quantitative analysis, with the significance level of 0.05, two variables CI and CR need to meet the requirement of smaller than 0.01 to make sure that the hypothesis are accepted. If you don’t use these two variables, which parameters did you use to prove that the results explanation is accurate?

3.   When using the average temperature raising at the level of 0.4^oC, but at which time, how to measure and who publish that data, so a reference should be cited to prove the data is reliable and trustworthy. You can take the official data from IMO, and other international organizations.

4.  The literature part is incoherence, there are other factors impacting the pelagic inhabitant such as water pollution, oil spill, noise pollution, ship collision, the negative impacts from alien species in ballast water,... instead of focusing on the thermal factor (climate change and sea water warming) when it comes to listing out both abiotic and biotic elements. In fact, apart from the global warming, climate change, ice-melting in two poles, sea level also rising as well, not just being warmer. Increasing sea level is also an important influenced factor which causes direct changes in the aquatic region, for example, changing the direction of currents, food chain also impacts the living habit of those species.

- In this part, there should be an introduction of layers of the pelagic zone, so that audience can imagine how large as well as how the pelagic is divided in reality. The structure would be clearer.

- All the influenced factors should be summarized and combined in a table in order to follow the research objects better.

5.     Geographical properties of the Black Sea: Black Sea is the closed and the saltiest sea in the world. In addition, there is a lack of oxygen circulation. So that, the researching scope is too narrowed and the applicability of it is limited due to its highlighted characteristics. In other words, the research results could not be used and applied for other oceanic areas. Thus, the contribution of the journal seems to be limited due to its applicability.   

6.     Analyzing the impacts of abiotic and biotic factors on the marine ecosystem by giving a case study of Black Sea is not really persuade because of its special and unfamiliar characteristics, compared to other international sea. So, why did you choose Black Sea is your researching object?

7.     When it comes to the research results, in the discussion part, you wrote down "there were 89 components and 203 linear connections, both positive and negative, connections that human thinking cannot make simultaneously to allow a clear analysis of the evolution of the pelagic component of the marine ecosystem..." However, those connections only show the direction of neither positive nor negative, there’re no statistic in terms of influenced values. In fact, there are a number of other software could solve this problem. For instant, SPSS, Fuzzy AHP, or SEM. For those, we are not only can find the connection between those components, but also calculate the factor weights for each component, from then, we can have a quantitative analysis-based research result, which is more reliable and trustworthy.

8. The conclusion part, there are some keywords/ solutions such as ballast water, fishery management, ecosystem resilience that have not been mentioned in the previous parts, even in the literature review or discussion paragraph, thus, these recommendations shall be subjective

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Moderate editing of English language required

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We wanted to express our gratitude for your insightful feedback. The suggested changes have been implemented in the updated paper. Your valuable input greatly contributes to our project's success.

Thank you for your collaboration and ongoing support.

Best regards,

The Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank for your reply. Base on your reply, I have one remain comment. The reasons why there was a discontinuity of the dataset as you explain (due to the COVID 19 and the war in Ukraine) should be written in the description, thus, now, readers can understand and empathy for the missing ones. On top of that, adding the table 2 and table 3 with the significance level “p” and “N” value mostly gave a logically explanation and proved the reliability as well as the trustworthy of the database. Last but not least, the added and modified content about the Black Sea characteristics and the conclusion sounds coherence now.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English should be carefully checked.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thak you for your new feedback. We added the paragraph as described in the attached document.

Best regards,

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf