Habitat Use, Terrestriality and Feeding Behaviour of Javan Slow Lorises in Urban Areas of a Multi-Use Landscape in Indonesia
, Marco Campera 2, Muhammad Ali Imron 3, Shrey Rakholia 4, Abhinav Mehta 4, Katherine Hedger 5 and K.A.I. Nekaris 6,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Overall this was an interesting paper to read. One broad suggestion is to consider using the term habitat decline as a compared to habitat loss when talking about the urban environments as the loris are using these as habitat. A few specific notes below.
Line 52. Two notes. 1) the second half of this sentence is unclear. 2) What percent of urban expansion is in to “natural” habitats as compared to something managed like agriculture or timber.
Line 68 – perhaps a citation or two here about the traits known in other species. - McDonnell, M.J. and Hahs, A.K., 2015. Adaptation and adaptedness of organisms to urban environments. Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics, 46, pp.261-280.
Figure 1 and 2. Could the lat and long for the two maps be made the same. In addition, is this the exact same area? Perhaps a bounding box would be helpful if not.
In addition with Figure 2, could some summary data be provided that summarizes the percent cover of the different land cover classes. And how does this coverage compare to the data in Figure 3
Line 374, I am not familiar with the local ecology of the region. But, what conditions result in bamboo vs forest? Is it a function of soil/slope/other natural factors. Or is it a function of past anthropogenic pressure?
Author Response
Reviewer 1
We thank the reviewer for very helpful comments - please see amendments below.
Overall this was an interesting paper to read. One broad suggestion is to consider using the term habitat decline as a compared to habitat loss when talking about the urban environments as the loris are using these as habitat. A few specific notes below.
Response: We thank you for your review and have integrated each of your suggestions. We have instead used the term habitat decline instead of habitat loss throughout the manuscript.
Line 52. Two notes. 1) the second half of this sentence is unclear. 2) What percent of urban expansion is in to “natural” habitats as compared to something managed like agriculture or timber.
Response: Global estimates of urban expansion percentage vary. Therefore, we have added some increase estimates of urban growth relative to Asia, as well as some specific percentages for Indonesia at Lines: 56-58.
Line 68 – perhaps a citation or two here about the traits known in other species. - McDonnell, M.J. and Hahs, A.K., 2015. Adaptation and adaptedness of organisms to urban environments. Annual review of ecology, evolution, and systematics, 46, pp.261-280.
Response: We have added several citations here regarding traits found in other studies. They can be found at Lines: 74 to 83.
Figure 1 and 2. Could the lat and long for the two maps be made the same. In addition, is this the exact same area? Perhaps a bounding box would be helpful if not.
Response: We have updated the figures so that the latitude and longitude for the two maps are the same. The bounding box that depicts the exact extent of the study site would unfortunately be too small to be visible on the map of Indonesia, therefore we used an arrow to depict where the municipality of Cipaganti is located and a circle to indicate the region of West Java. To resolve the confusion in the figures, we have removed the blue circle from Figure 1a, as Reviewer 3 also made this suggestion.
In addition with Figure 2, could some summary data be provided that summarizes the percent cover of the different land cover classes. And how does this coverage compare to the data in Figure 3
Response: The data for this was already present for the largest land cover (bamboo) and urban land cover as it is the main focus, but we have added the data that shows the area of all of the land cover classes as well as their percentages at Lines: 307 to 312.
Line 374, I am not familiar with the local ecology of the region. But, what conditions result in bamboo vs forest? Is it a function of soil/slope/other natural factors. Or is it a function of past anthropogenic pressure?
Response: We have added some additional information regarding this instead in the Methods as part of the “Study Site” section at Lines 145-151.
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript is confusing lack and of structure. The results are not connected with the main title . i.e. almost haft result page in results explaining the results of a confusion matrix. I recommend to think about the real aims of the manuscript, so define the results using proper analysis such manly resource selection functions or another for habitat used, show also the results of each home range of each individual and other descriptive tables that help to better tell a story. Avoid spending space on unnecessary methods such the way to digitalized a vector and focus the most on the design and the way the data should tell a story. I recommend you do a more exhaustive literature review of habitat used methods for such the case as well as re-define your research question . The data set seems to be robust, but the wrong analysis and the lack of structure of this manuscript lead to misleading and confusing results. I did had a hard time trying to connect all the manuscript so this is a prompt , to rethink and improve the manuscript focus on wildlife resource use.
Author Response
We thank you for your review and have edited the manuscript based on all reviewer comments. We felt, especially following other similar publications, that the confusion matrix was important to present so as to understand the accuracy of the land cover classification, as it is what much of the analysis is cross-referenced with. Based off your comment, we have added the confusion matrix instead as an appendix and have linked it to the results at Line: 294. We have also increased the points for the accuracy assessment from 100 points to 400 points and have included these results based on reviewer comments. In the supplementary materials you will also find the descriptive table as requested, which includes the results of each home range of each individual loris. We felt that these tables were too large to include in the main body of the manuscript but wanted to include them in the supplementary materials for extra details. We have stated our research questions clearly in Lines: 125-130 and we have addressed each of these questions in order in the results and discussed them each in the discussion. We have also added some extra literature throughout the paper. In previous submissions to Land and similar journals, we found this was a useful narrative to present our results, with reviewers 1 and 3 also finding it acceptable. We invite you to re-read the manuscript and to ask for any further specific edits and we will integrate them.
We have also addressed the detailed comments of the other reviewers and we hope too that this will alleviate some of your concerns.
Reviewer 3 Report
This is an interesting and thorough study about an important topic. However, substantial revisions are necessary before the paper can be ready for publication. Specific comments are listed below. Most of all, I have concerns about the imagery and accuracy assessment points used for the land cover classification portion of the methods. My concerns are included in the list below. Thank you!
Abstract:
Page 1, Line 18: I think it would be a good idea to add a little more explanation to the sentence "On primate species that is under threat..." How threatened is the Javan slow loris, and why is it important? The authors mention later in the abstract that it is Critically Endangered. I think it would be good to mention that here to highlight the urgency and importance of Javan slow loris conservation.
Page 1, Line 23: Please revise the phrase "loris' habitat". If the authors are talking about loris habitat in general, it should be changed to "loris habitat". If they are talking about one specific loris's habitat, it should be changed to something like "each loris's habitat" or "an individual loris's habitat". But please be sure to put a "s" after the apostrophe.
Page 1, Line 27: Please change "loris' habitat" to "loris's habitat".
Page 1, Line 28-30: The sentence that begins with "Only urban areas..." is kind of confusing in its current form. Please revise for clarity. What was "more than doubling in some cases"? The amount of urban habitat used by the lorises? Please be specific.
Page 1, Line 32: Please remove the semicolon after "frequent" to make this two separate sentences.
Introduction:
Page 2, Line 47: I don't think that "exponentially" is the best word choice in this sentence. "Exponentially" usually refers to growth rate, and I don't think that fits the context of this sentence. Please consider changing "exponentially" to "highly" or "substantially" or a similar word.
Page 2, Line 59: Please change "hindering" to "hinder" to maintain agreement with the first verb in the sentence ("present").
Page 3, Line 117: Please change "towards" to "toward".
Materials and Methods:
Page 3, Line 122: Please add a few sentences to this section explaining why you chose Cipaganti as your study site. What makes it a suitable/representative/important place to study Javan slow lorises and their habitat?
Page 4, Line 138: What does the blue circle represent in Figure 1a?
Page 4, Line 138: Please add a scale bar and north arrow to Figure 1b.
Page 5, Line 158: Please add a table and/or paragraph to this section summarizing the gender, maturity level, etc of the 29 collared lorises that were studied for this project. Later on in the Results and Discussion sections, the authors specifically highlight juvenile male lorises' use of urban landscapes. I think it would very important here in the Methods to share how many of the lorises in the study were male/female, juvenile/adult, etc.
Page 5, Line 161: Please change "are subject" to "were subject". The rest of your Methods section is in past tense, so this verb should be, too.
Page 5, Line 164: Please change "identify" to "identified".
Page 5, Line 171: How many lorises did you have to remove collars from because they were dispersing outside the study site? Please add that information here.
Page 5, Line 184: More information is needed about your land cover classification. What do you mean by "Google satellite image"? Did you just take a screenshot of an image in Google Earth? To my knowledge, Google Earth does not have a method to expert a multi-band RGB image with radiometric pixel values. Did you create a multi-band image in Google Earth Engine? Did you get it from another source? Additionally, what was the original resolution of the image? What satellite originally captured it? Google is the middle-man, but the image had to come from a specific satellite. You mention that the image was geo-rectified. Was it provided already geo-rectified, or did you geo-rectify it? If so, please describe your process.
Page 5, Line 202: 100 control points does not seem like enough points to produce a robust accuracy assessment for 6 land cover classes. I strongly recommend that you repeat your accuracy assessment with at least 300 total control points.
Page 6, Line 223: Please change "loris' " to "loris's".
Page, 6, Line 237: Please change "loris' " to "loris's".
Results:
Page 8, Line 291-292: The sentence that begins "Whilst mapping" does not make sense. Please revise for clarity. What does "some" mean in this sentence? Some *what* resulted in more than one home range?
Page 9, Line 322: Please add a north arrow to Figure 3.
Discussion:
Page 12, Line 401: Are the lorises "expanding into these urban landscapes", as written in this sentence, or are the urban landscapes expanding into the lorises' habitat?
Page 13, Line 488: Please also list the percentages of nectars and fruits eaten, not just the raw number of occurences.
Page 14, Line 531-533: The sentence that beings with "This can be problematic..." is a run-on sentence. Please break the sentence into two or more sentences to make it more clear and concise.
Page 14, Line 535: Please start a new sentence at "however." In other words, please put a period after "human diseases." Then begin a new sentence with "However, Javan slow lorises..."
Page 15, Line 550: The phrase "tailed woolly monkey" should be "yellow-tailed woolly monkey".
The use of English language is sound. I have listed some minor grammatical comments in the "Comments and Suggestions for Authors" above.
Author Response
This is an interesting and thorough study about an important topic. However, substantial revisions are necessary before the paper can be ready for publication. Specific comments are listed below. Most of all, I have concerns about the imagery and accuracy assessment points used for the land cover classification portion of the methods. My concerns are included in the list below. Thank you!
Response: We thank you for your review and have specifically focused on resolving your major concerns. We have responded to all of your revisions to prepare the paper for publication.
Abstract:
Page 1, Line 18: I think it would be a good idea to add a little more explanation to the sentence "On primate species that is under threat..." How threatened is the Javan slow loris, and why is it important? The authors mention later in the abstract that it is Critically Endangered. I think it would be good to mention that here to highlight the urgency and importance of Javan slow loris conservation.
Response: We have added: “One primate species threatened by habitat loss is the fully arboreal Javan slow loris (Nycticebus javanicus). The non-leaping species not only relies on canopy continuity but is also subject to capture for illegal wildlife trade, especially in anthropogenic landscapes where they are easier to catch.”
Page 1, Line 23: Please revise the phrase "loris' habitat". If the authors are talking about loris habitat in general, it should be changed to "loris habitat". If they are talking about one specific loris's habitat, it should be changed to something like "each loris's habitat" or "an individual loris's habitat". But please be sure to put a "s" after the apostrophe.
Response: We have changed to “loris habitat” as it is about their habitat in general.
Page 1, Line 27: Please change "loris' habitat" to "loris's habitat".
Response: We have checked the grammar rule for this which states that if it is a two-syllable word ending in S, then an apostrophe should not be added. Both forms however are accepted in the English language, therefore, we have changed this to “loris’s habitat” to make it easier to read.
Page 1, Line 28-30: The sentence that begins with "Only urban areas..." is kind of confusing in its current form. Please revise for clarity. What was "more than doubling in some cases"? The amount of urban habitat used by the lorises? Please be specific.
Response: We removed “more than doubling in some cases”, we felt that the p-values and the sentence in itself already highlights the significant increase.
Page 1, Line 32: Please remove the semicolon after "frequent" to make this two separate sentences.
Response: We have removed the semicolon and created a new sentence at Line: 34.
Introduction:
Page 2, Line 47: I don't think that "exponentially" is the best word choice in this sentence. "Exponentially" usually refers to growth rate, and I don't think that fits the context of this sentence. Please consider changing "exponentially" to "highly" or "substantially" or a similar word.
Response: We have changed to “extensively” to fit the context whilst highlighting the significant disturbance.
Page 2, Line 59: Please change "hindering" to "hinder" to maintain agreement with the first verb in the sentence ("present").
Response: We have changed to “hinder”.
Page 3, Line 117: Please change "towards" to "toward".
Response: We have changed to “toward”.
Materials and Methods:
Page 3, Line 122: Please add a few sentences to this section explaining why you chose Cipaganti as your study site. What makes it a suitable/representative/important place to study Javan slow lorises and their habitat?
Response: We have added from Line 137: “We have been working at this site continuously since 2012. It was originally selected for several reasons: anthropogenic landscapes border a more natural forest, allowing us to examine the ecological implications of these habitats; slow lorises were heavily hunted at this site in the past, making it an ideal area for conservation outreach; the mosaic structure of the habitat is characterised by frequent clumps of low trees, meaning we could catch the lorises, which do not enter traps, in order to radio collar them.”
Page 4, Line 138: What does the blue circle represent in Figure 1a?
Response: We used an arrow to depict where the municipality of Cipaganti is located and the blue circle to indicate the region of West Java. To resolve the confusion in the figures, we have removed the blue circle from the figure.
Page 4, Line 138: Please add a scale bar and north arrow to Figure 1b.
Response: We have added a scale bar and a north arrow to Figure 1b.
Page 5, Line 158: Please add a table and/or paragraph to this section summarizing the gender, maturity level, etc of the 29 collared lorises that were studied for this project. Later on in the Results and Discussion sections, the authors specifically highlight juvenile male lorises' use of urban landscapes. I think it would very important here in the Methods to share how many of the lorises in the study were male/female, juvenile/adult, etc.
Response: We have included this in the supplementary materials, but we have also added a short summary of the gender and maturity level in the Methods at Lines: 175 -176.
Page 5, Line 161: Please change "are subject" to "were subject". The rest of your Methods section is in past tense, so this verb should be, too.
Response: We have changed to “were subject”.
Page 5, Line 164: Please change "identify" to "identified".
Response: We have changed to “identified”.
Page 5, Line 171: How many lorises did you have to remove collars from because they were dispersing outside the study site? Please add that information here
Response: We removed the collars from four individuals, we have added this information.
Page 5, Line 184: More information is needed about your land cover classification. What do you mean by "Google satellite image"? Did you just take a screenshot of an image in Google Earth? To my knowledge, Google Earth does not have a method to expert a multi-band RGB image with radiometric pixel values. Did you create a multi-band image in Google Earth Engine? Did you get it from another source? Additionally, what was the original resolution of the image? What satellite originally captured it? Google is the middle-man, but the image had to come from a specific satellite. You mention that the image was geo-rectified. Was it provided already geo-rectified, or did you geo-rectify it? If so, please describe your process.
Response: Thanks for the questions, we realised we did not add the relevant information and it was confusing. We have now responded to the comments and added the complete information to the manuscript from Line: 210. To summarise, we used an Enhanced Compression Wavelet file (already geo-rectified) obtained from the QuickMapServices tool in QGIS. The satellite was GeoEye-1 with a resolution of 50 cm.
Page 5, Line 202: 100 control points does not seem like enough points to produce a robust accuracy assessment for 6 land cover classes. I strongly recommend that you repeat your accuracy assessment with at least 300 total control points.
Response: We have followed your comment and repeated the accuracy assessment with 400 control points to provide as a robust assessment of the classification. This resulted in very little changes to the accuracy results, with some slightly lower and some slightly higher individual results but the same user and producer accuracies. We have updated all of the results in the manuscript at lines: 294 to 306. Urban was one of the land cover classes that did not change, which we feel strengthens our key point. We have moved the confusion matrix table to the appendix due to another reviewer’s comment.
Page 6, Line 223: Please change "loris' " to "loris's".
Response: As responded above, both forms are accepted in the English language, but we have changed this to “loris’s” to make it easier to read.
Page, 6, Line 237: Please change "loris' " to "loris's".
Response: We have changed this to “loris’s” to keep the same usage throughout the manuscript.
Results:
Page 8, Line 291-292: The sentence that begins "Whilst mapping" does not make sense. Please revise for clarity. What does "some" mean in this sentence? Some *what* resulted in more than one home range?
Response: We have changed this at Line: 318 to “Whilst generating the home ranges and core areas of each of the lorises, some individuals resulted in more than one home range or core area during a period.”
Page 9, Line 322: Please add a north arrow to Figure 3.
Response: There is already a north arrow present on Figure 3, we have added a larger one to make it more visible.
Discussion:
Page 12, Line 401: Are the lorises "expanding into these urban landscapes", as written in this sentence, or are the urban landscapes expanding into the lorises' habitat?
Response: We have changed to “when encountering these urban landscapes” at Line: 428 to show the overlap between the area and the species.
Page 13, Line 488: Please also list the percentages of nectars and fruits eaten, not just the raw number of occurences.
Response: We have also added the percentages here at Line: 516.
Page 14, Line 531-533: The sentence that beings with "This can be problematic..." is a run-on sentence. Please break the sentence into two or more sentences to make it more clear and concise.
Response: We have changed this into two sentences at Lines: 559-562.
Page 14, Line 535: Please start a new sentence at "however." In other words, please put a period after "human diseases." Then begin a new sentence with "However, Javan slow lorises..."
Response: We have started a new sentence here and reworded it at Line: 564.
Page 15, Line 550: The phrase "tailed woolly monkey" should be "yellow-tailed woolly monkey".
Response: We have corrected this to “yellow-tailed woolly monkey”.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
This version v.2 is is barely corrected and most of the previous suggestions were not implemented, the main problem about this manuscript rely in the results , I am not against the descriptive studies but the main idea is not clearly supported in the results section. On the other hand in the method section please go a read a good method section to get an idea, remember the method section is a like a recipe not a QGIS tutorial so much un-necessary details.
As recommendation If you guys used a bad example of a manuscript as a reference your manuscript would be the same, please address all comments and suggestions one by one in a response letter were you show any improvement or rejection. Sorry but ,I just keep it until the results section in order to get back a well edited better version (attached a pdf with all my concerns).
There is a good history to tell by you guys should help yourself listen to what editors highly or recommendation otherwise this is useless.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
In case the reviewers cannot see our comments to the other reviewers, we include them both here.
Reviewer 3:
- Dear authors,Thank you very much for carefully revising the manuscript! I think that it has been substantially improved. I only have one minor revision that I think you should make. After that, I think the manuscript will be suitable for publication.
We thank you for taking the time to read the revised manuscript and are very grateful for the helpful comments to make the manuscript suitable for publication.
- Page 8, Line 318-319: The sentence "Whilst generating the home ranges and core areas of each of the lorises, some individuals resulted in more than one home range or core area during a period" does not make sense. I think I understand the point you are trying to make, but I think it could be worded more clearly. I don't think it is quite right to say that some individuals "resulted" in more than one home range. Would it be more appropriate to say that some individuals "had" or "lived in" or "occupied" more than one home range?
We understand the point you are making and would like it to be more readable and clearer for readers, so we have changed the sentence to “Whilst generating the home ranges and core areas of each of the lorises, some individuals were found to have more than one home range or core area during a period.”
Reviewer 2:
We are sorry the reviewer did not see an improvement and was not satisfied by our comments. We will try to make them more extended and highlight all the parts, but please feel free to ask for specific edits. We would appreciate if the reviewer can indicate the specific points that needs more work otherwise we do not know what they prefer to be altered.
- This version 2 is is barely corrected and most of the previous suggestions were not implemented, the main problem about this manuscript rely in the results , I am not against the descriptive studies but the main idea is not clearly supported in the results section.
We were not sent a document with track changes last time, so we are sorry if we missed edits that you required. We did modify the paper substantially on the basis of the comments of the other reviewers, including redoing a major part of the analysis. We feel that our narrative is quite straightforward as we wanted to report the use of urban environments by the study species, and we reported the proportion of home ranges, diet and terrestriality in urban environments, and also how seasonality can affect the use of urban environments. Although this may come across as descriptive, it required extensive field work, mapping and radio tracking, and the methods we used have been implemented by many other studies that we cited. To examine urban land use we first needed to define the land cover in the area, and we supported our selection of land cover and a confusion matrix was necessary (another reviewer asked to increase the sampling effort for that). Based on your previous suggestion we moved the confusion matrix to appendix A so that it does not break the flow of the narrative. We do not think that resource selection functions are needed as we only investigate the use of urban environments; we do not have the myriad of other factors that are normally implemented within RSF, and thus these models are not suitable for our study.
- On the other hand in the method section please go a read a good method section to get an idea, remember the method section is a like a recipe not a QGIS tutorial so much un-necessary details.
We realised we did not spot the part where we included the digitalisation and that was requested to be removed. We have now removed that part and another part which we felt was not necessary (see tracked changes in section 2.3). Please feel free to ask for more edits if needed.
- As recommendation If you guys used a bad example of a manuscript as a reference your manuscript would be the same, please address all comments and suggestions one by one in a response letter were you show any improvement or rejection. Sorry but ,I just keep it until the results section in order to get back a well edited better version (attached a pdf with all my concerns).
We apologise if we did not create a point-by-point document; perhaps you did not have access to the comments made to the other reviewers, who made very specific suggestions. We added them all line by line and point by point. Please see below:
The manuscript is confusing lack and of structure. The results are not connected with the main title . i.e. almost haft result page in results explaining the results of a confusion matrix.
We felt, especially following other similar publications and based on the comments from the other reviewers, that the confusion matrix was important to present so as to understand the accuracy of the land cover classification, as it is what much of the analysis is cross-referenced with. Based off your comment, we have added the confusion matrix instead as an appendix and have linked it to the results. We have also increased the points for the accuracy assessment from 100 points to 400 points and have included these results based on reviewer comments.
I recommend to think about the real aims of the manuscript, so define the results using proper analysis such manly resource selection functions or another for habitat used, show also the results of each home range of each individual and other descriptive tables that help to better tell a story.
We have stated our research questions in Lines: 125-130 and we have addressed each of these questions in order in the results and discussed them each in the discussion. We feel that our narrative is quite straightforward as we wanted to report the use of urban environments by the study species, and we reported the proportion of home ranges, diet and terrestriality in urban environments, and also how seasonality can affect the use of urban environments. We do not think that resource selection functions are needed as we only investigate the use of urban environments, we do not have other factors.
In the supplementary materials you will also find the descriptive table as requested, which includes the results of each home range of each individual animal. We felt that these tables were too large to include in the main body of the manuscript but decided to include them in the supplementary materials for extra details.
Avoid spending space on unnecessary methods such the way to digitalized a vector and focus the most on the design and the way the data should tell a story.
Please see the edited parts in sections 2.3 and 2.6. Please feel free to ask to remove other parts if needed. We think that the other parts are very important so that the methods are replicable.
I recommend you do a more exhaustive literature review of habitat used methods for such the case as well as re-define your research question .
We have also added extra literature throughout the paper, also based on the comments from the other reviewers. See parts/references highlighted in yellow.
The data set seems to be robust, but the wrong analysis and the lack of structure of this manuscript lead to misleading and confusing results. I did had a hard time trying to connect all the manuscript so this is a prompt , to rethink and improve the manuscript focus on wildlife resource use.
In previous submissions to Land and similar journals, we found this was a useful narrative to present our results, with reviewers 1 and 3 also finding it acceptable. We invite you to re-read the manuscript and to ask for any further specific edits and we will integrate them.
There is a good history to tell by you guys should help yourself listen to what editors highly or recommendation otherwise this is useless.
We are always happy to listen to reviewers. We also realise that for some methods, there may be different views. In this case, we simply do not have data suitable for Resource Selection Function models, which is why we chose the models we use here, and these were agreeable to the other reviewers. Please feel free to ask for additional edits.
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear authors,
Thank you very much for carefully revising the manuscript! I think that it has been substantially improved. I only have one minor revision that I think you should make. After that, I think the manuscript will be suitable for publication.
Page 8, Line 318-319: The sentence "Whilst generating the home ranges and core areas of each of the lorises, some individuals resulted in more than one home range or core area during a period" does not make sense. I think I understand the point you are trying to make, but I think it could be worded more clearly. I don't think it is quite right to say that some individuals "resulted" in more than one home range. Would it be more appropriate to say that some individuals "had" or "lived in" or "occupied" more than one home range?
Author Response
In case the reviewers cannot see the comments of the other reviewers we upload them both here.
Reviewer 3:
- Dear authors,Thank you very much for carefully revising the manuscript! I think that it has been substantially improved. I only have one minor revision that I think you should make. After that, I think the manuscript will be suitable for publication.
We thank you for taking the time to read the revised manuscript and are very grateful for the helpful comments to make the manuscript suitable for publication.
- Page 8, Line 318-319: The sentence "Whilst generating the home ranges and core areas of each of the lorises, some individuals resulted in more than one home range or core area during a period" does not make sense. I think I understand the point you are trying to make, but I think it could be worded more clearly. I don't think it is quite right to say that some individuals "resulted" in more than one home range. Would it be more appropriate to say that some individuals "had" or "lived in" or "occupied" more than one home range?
We understand the point you are making and would like it to be more readable and clearer for readers, so we have changed the sentence to “Whilst generating the home ranges and core areas of each of the lorises, some individuals were found to have more than one home range or core area during a period.”
Reviewer 2:
We are sorry the reviewer did not see an improvement and was not satisfied by our comments. We will try to make them more extended and highlight all the parts, but please feel free to ask for specific edits. We would appreciate if the reviewer can indicate the specific points that needs more work otherwise we do not know what they prefer to be altered.
- This version 2 is is barely corrected and most of the previous suggestions were not implemented, the main problem about this manuscript rely in the results , I am not against the descriptive studies but the main idea is not clearly supported in the results section.
We were not sent a document with track changes last time, so we are sorry if we missed edits that you required. We did modify the paper substantially on the basis of the comments of the other reviewers, including redoing a major part of the analysis. We feel that our narrative is quite straightforward as we wanted to report the use of urban environments by the study species, and we reported the proportion of home ranges, diet and terrestriality in urban environments, and also how seasonality can affect the use of urban environments. Although this may come across as descriptive, it required extensive field work, mapping and radio tracking, and the methods we used have been implemented by many other studies that we cited. To examine urban land use we first needed to define the land cover in the area, and we supported our selection of land cover and a confusion matrix was necessary (another reviewer asked to increase the sampling effort for that). Based on your previous suggestion we moved the confusion matrix to appendix A so that it does not break the flow of the narrative. We do not think that resource selection functions are needed as we only investigate the use of urban environments; we do not have the myriad of other factors that are normally implemented within RSF, and thus these models are not suitable for our study.
- On the other hand in the method section please go a read a good method section to get an idea, remember the method section is a like a recipe not a QGIS tutorial so much un-necessary details.
We realised we did not spot the part where we included the digitalisation and that was requested to be removed. We have now removed that part and another part which we felt was not necessary (see tracked changes in section 2.3). Please feel free to ask for more edits if needed.
- As recommendation If you guys used a bad example of a manuscript as a reference your manuscript would be the same, please address all comments and suggestions one by one in a response letter were you show any improvement or rejection. Sorry but ,I just keep it until the results section in order to get back a well edited better version (attached a pdf with all my concerns).
We apologise if we did not create a point-by-point document; perhaps you did not have access to the comments made to the other reviewers, who made very specific suggestions. We added them all line by line and point by point. Please see below:
The manuscript is confusing lack and of structure. The results are not connected with the main title . i.e. almost haft result page in results explaining the results of a confusion matrix.
We felt, especially following other similar publications and based on the comments from the other reviewers, that the confusion matrix was important to present so as to understand the accuracy of the land cover classification, as it is what much of the analysis is cross-referenced with. Based off your comment, we have added the confusion matrix instead as an appendix and have linked it to the results. We have also increased the points for the accuracy assessment from 100 points to 400 points and have included these results based on reviewer comments.
I recommend to think about the real aims of the manuscript, so define the results using proper analysis such manly resource selection functions or another for habitat used, show also the results of each home range of each individual and other descriptive tables that help to better tell a story.
We have stated our research questions in Lines: 125-130 and we have addressed each of these questions in order in the results and discussed them each in the discussion. We feel that our narrative is quite straightforward as we wanted to report the use of urban environments by the study species, and we reported the proportion of home ranges, diet and terrestriality in urban environments, and also how seasonality can affect the use of urban environments. We do not think that resource selection functions are needed as we only investigate the use of urban environments, we do not have other factors.
In the supplementary materials you will also find the descriptive table as requested, which includes the results of each home range of each individual animal. We felt that these tables were too large to include in the main body of the manuscript but decided to include them in the supplementary materials for extra details.
Avoid spending space on unnecessary methods such the way to digitalized a vector and focus the most on the design and the way the data should tell a story.
Please see the edited parts in sections 2.3 and 2.6. Please feel free to ask to remove other parts if needed. We think that the other parts are very important so that the methods are replicable.
I recommend you do a more exhaustive literature review of habitat used methods for such the case as well as re-define your research question .
We have also added extra literature throughout the paper, also based on the comments from the other reviewers. See parts/references highlighted in yellow.
The data set seems to be robust, but the wrong analysis and the lack of structure of this manuscript lead to misleading and confusing results. I did had a hard time trying to connect all the manuscript so this is a prompt , to rethink and improve the manuscript focus on wildlife resource use.
In previous submissions to Land and similar journals, we found this was a useful narrative to present our results, with reviewers 1 and 3 also finding it acceptable. We invite you to re-read the manuscript and to ask for any further specific edits and we will integrate them.
There is a good history to tell by you guys should help yourself listen to what editors highly or recommendation otherwise this is useless.
We are always happy to listen to reviewers. We also realise that for some methods, there may be different views. In this case, we simply do not have data suitable for Resource Selection Function models, which is why we chose the models we use here, and these were agreeable to the other reviewers. Please feel free to ask for additional edits.
