Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is recommended for the print in “Insect” after minor revision.

All comments and suggestions for correction are given in the text （see PDF file）

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

minor

Author Response

Thank you very much for your valuable and useful corrections and recommendations on the manuscript! I have considered and corrected them all. I have corrected the English in the text. Also, I added two paragraphs before the key and the map of species spreading in the territory of Ukraine, as reviewer 2 recommended

Thanks a lot for your kind help in preparing our manuscript!

Best wishes,

Andriy

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors recorded Sciara species from Ukraine, with four newly recorded species. There are several parts of the ms should/could be improved: 

1. Only one male hypopygium photo is presented for each species, and fig. 8 has higher quality than others. I suggest to put more photos and improve the photo quality. 

2. There are ~20 species of Sciara species in Europe, but the key only includes 12 species. I suggest authors to make a key for all European species, and add distribution information in the key (as additional information of the results, not as a character for identification). 

3. I suggest authors to add a map to show the distribution of these species in Ukraine. 

Other minor comments see attached file. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Point 1: Only one male hypopygium photo is presented for each species, and fig. 8 has higher quality than others. I suggest to put more photos and improve the photo quality.

Response 1: Unfortunately, I was given only 10 days by the editorial office to make all the corrections, but I need much more time to prepare more figures. The point is that I prepared figures in our Institutional Centre of Collective Use of Scientific Instruments "Animalia" and in order to get access to the microscope we need to register in advance. I did not prepare more figures before because I thought that the figures of Hypopygia will be enough for the faunistic work, but you are right - more pictures will improve the visualization and make the article more illustrated. Thanks a lot for your advice, I will keep this in mind for my future work!

Regarding the quality of the figures - I have to heavily compress the original figure because it is too large to upload to the journal website. But I am adding them in uncompressed size to a new variant of the manuscript and the .tiff format that I will send to the editor.

Point 2: There are ~20 species of Sciara species in Europe, but the key only includes 12 species. I suggest authors to make a key for all European species, and add distribution information in the key (as additional information of the results, not as a character for identification).

Response 2: Thank you for this suggestion! There is an error in the Discussion section - only 12 species are recorded in Europe, more than 20 are recorded in the whole Palaearctic, I have corrected the Discussion text.

Regarding the distribution information, I added two paragraphs before the key, see the new manuscript variant.

Point 3: I suggest authors to add a map to show the distribution of these species in Ukraine.

Response 3: Thanks for this useful suggestion! I have added a map showing the distribution of Sciara species in Ukraine.

Point 4: In the abstract, you mentioned there are eight species and four newly recorded. So, there should be four described.

Response 4: In the abstract I show 8 species that we found in the field. Previously, 5 species were recorded in Ukraine in the literature. Four species from our collections were found for the first time, the other four were known. One more, S. militaris, was registered in the country as "armyworm" and is missing in our collections. In total we have 9 registered species: 4 first mentioned in the manuscript, 4 confirmed previously known in the literature and 1 unconfirmed S. militaris. In the paragraph “The sciarid fauna of Ukraine remains poorly studied [10–13]. The current number of 63 registered Sciaridae in Ukraine contains 101 species from 17 genera [14]. This list includes 64 only 5 Sciara species [15].” I have mentioned 5 species published in the literature so far.

I have considered and corrected all your other comments, as well as corrected the English in the text.

Thank you very much for your kind help in preparing our manuscript!

Best wishes,

Andriy

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors has improved the ms significantly. I appreciate authors' effort, and I am satisfied with the current version.

Just two remainders for the proof stage: 1. quotation marks need to be checked; 2. numbers lower than 10 should be spelled in English, rather than in Arabic numerals.