Prioritizating Birds’ Habitats for Conservation to Mitigate Urbanization Impacts Using Field Survey-Based Integrated Models in the Yangtze River Estuary

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

One of the current trends in modern ecology is modeling changes in the state of habitats and biological diversity in the future. These studies are important because predictive models provide practical guidance for managing transformed landscapes to maintain habitat and species diversity. Developing megacities are “consuming” the natural environment, leading to a decrease in the diversity of bird communities. Some species are disappearing. The peer-reviewed study focuses on prioritizing bird habitat for conservation to mitigate the effects of urbanization in the Yangtze River Estuary. Large cities like Shanghai have a strong impact on landscapes and biodiversity. The authors, using observations of bird species composition and modeling techniques to convincingly demonstrate the decline of bird habitats since 2000, estimated habitat loss by 2037. The study concluded that maintaining a 300-meter-wide buffer zone around built-up areas is critical to preserving bird habitat. Some practical conclusions are drawn. The study was carried out according to a clear plan, the methodology and materials were described in detail. The results are presented quite fully. The conclusions are consistent with the results and discussion. The manuscript has been technically prepared. There are no fundamental comments. I recommend it for publication after minor editing.

Technical comments

There are many pictures. For example, Figure 1 combines 11 figures. This is possible, but the legend on some of them has too small a font and is difficult to read (Fig. 1b, 1c). Designation (b) coincided with the dark background and became invisible. This needs to be corrected.

Author Response

Response to reviewers

Manuscript number: land-2687458

Title: Prioritizating birds’ habitats for conservation to mitigate urbanization impacts using field-survey based integrated models in Yangtze River Estuary

Article type: Article

 

Dear editor and reviewers,

Thank you for your carefully reviewing on our paper entitled “Prioritizating birds’ habitats for conservation to mitigate urbanization impacts using field-survey based integrated models in Yangtze River Estuary (land-2687458)”. We appreciate all the reviewers for their insightful comments and constructive suggestions. These comments and suggestions are all very helpful for improving our paper. We have made both the technical and grammatical revisions carefully according to their comments, and the point-by-point responses are listed below. The changes we have made in response to reviewers' comments are in blue in the revised manuscript. We hope that the revised manuscript is acceptable for publication.

Kind regards,

Shubo Fang

Soil, Water, and Ecosystem Sciences Department, University of Florida/IFAS/West Florida Research and Edu-cation Center, Milton, FL, USA, 32583

sfang1@ufl.edu

 

Responses to the reviewers are as follows:

-Reviewer #1

Comments:

One of the current trends in modern ecology is modeling changes in the state of habitats and biological diversity in the future. These studies are important because predictive models provide practical guidance for managing transformed landscapes to maintain habitat and species diversity. Developing megacities are “consuming” the natural environment, leading to a decrease in the diversity of bird communities. Some species are disappearing. The peer-reviewed study focuses on prioritizing bird habitat for conservation to mitigate the effects of urbanization in the Yangtze River Estuary. Large cities like Shanghai have a strong impact on landscapes and biodiversity. The authors, using observations of bird species composition and modeling techniques to convincingly demonstrate the decline of bird habitats since 2000, estimated habitat loss by 2037. The study concluded that maintaining a 300-meter-wide buffer zone around built-up areas is critical to preserving bird habitat. Some practical conclusions are drawn. The study was carried out according to a clear plan, the methodology and materials were described in detail. The results are presented quite fully. The conclusions are consistent with the results and discussion. The manuscript has been technically prepared. There are no fundamental comments. I recommend it for publication after minor editing.

Technical comments

There are many pictures. For example, Figure 1 combines 11 figures. This is possible, but the legend on some of them has too small a font and is difficult to read (Fig. 1b, 1c). Designation (b) coincided with the dark background and became invisible. This needs to be corrected.

Figure 1 in the revised manuscript, thanks for your detailed comments of the figures. We have streamlined the number of images in Figure 1 and increased their clarity by enlarging the font size and adjusting the position of the labels in the legends, based on this valuable comment. Please see page 3 of the revised manuscript, lines 92–96.

Figure 1. The location of the Yangtze River estuary in China. (a) The administrative division of the Yangtze River estuary and the central location of the bird research area on Chongming Island within the survey area. (b) The spatial distribution of sampling points, walking transect lines, and vehicle transect lines. A - F Bird presence points of various ecological groups. (A Terrestores. B, Raptatores. C, Passeres. D, Grallatores. E, Natatores. F, Scansorial.).

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

I think you have produced an interesting paper.

In general, results are good and important, but there are weak points in the Bird Survey Section, that I hope you be able to fix.

Please find some sugestions below.

 

Introduction.

It is not appropriate starting the Introduction talking about the Yangtze River Estuary. Land has an international readership, so start the Introduction with sentences that deal with spatiotemporal changes in landscapes now dominated by urbanized areas. This for studies conducted worldwide. Then the next paragraphs can deal with Chinese landscapes and then go deep to the YRE aspects.

Methods. 

Section 2.2. Bird surveys.

This section has several weak points that make impossible any attempt of replication.

You have 3 months and 3 days of survey per month. So, your sampling involved only 9 days of field work. It is really not much. A very weak aspect of the study.

You mention 20 sampling sites, including 6 and 4 walking and vehicle sampling lines (transcets). But what were the other 10 sampling sites ?

How did you control for time-of-day bias (7:00AM to 7:00PM), and for those related to different observers ?

All 20 sampling sites were sampled in each month ?

Line 98. What do you mean with "bird observation points" ? Explain....if so, how you obtained its exactposition if you were in the vehicle ?

Line 99. Actually you mean 11,696 "bird records".... 

Line 99. I did not understand the menaing of observed and unobserved....

 

Results

Captions of figures and titles of tables are too short. It would be good to inform the region of the sudy, and China, with no abbreviations.

Figure 2. You have to explain in its caption the meaning of these abbreviations. 

Lines 224-226. It appears to be methods, not Results.

Section 3.1. You have to explain in the text what environmental variables were correlated with each one of the bird ecological groups. You provided a figure but no comment on this part. Explain CCA in the figure caption.

Line 244. You abbreviate (again) LULC.

Section 3.3. To my knowledge, urban greenland is important for birds, and it is in figure 4, but you did not mention it in the text. Make sure that you comment on all landscape elements (your categories of land/water).

Figure 5. Explain AUC in the caption.

Figure 6. You provided five scenarios (2000-2037) for 6 categories (A-F), but it is impossible to know what they are. Explain the meaning of A-F in the caption. Also, what are the red points in these maps? I suggest that you move the graph with bars and lines, and its legend, to another figure (a new figure 7).  The space is small there.

Line 279-280. It is methods....

 

Discussion

I consider strange that you keeping citing your figures and supplementary material here in the Discussion. They were already called in the Results. Here you should compare your results with those of similar approaches conducted in China and other regions.

Despite this, the dicussion is of good quality.

 

Conclusion

It would be better to do not abbrevations here (YHE and LULC).

Comments on the Quality of English Language

It appears to do not have serious problems regarding the English.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf