Rockfish Species Trends in Puget Sound, Washington, USA, 2009–2023

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study analyzes rockfish community trends within Puget Sound from 2009-2023. It presents 13 dataset includes 157 recorded dive transects from nine rocky reef habitats at depth 5-24m 14 throughout four basins. Although, I find that it is important to publish such data, it faces several important issues as it stands. First, and most important is to run appropriate statistical analyses for such spatio-temporally fragmented and heterogenous data. It is obvious that trends in data/series are driven by sampling locations and annual coverage of conducted surveys. The essential statistical rules are corrupted right now. Please find my specific comments from the text.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Scientific expression could be improved.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I think that the study fully shows what it wants to expose and that is that these species have not recovered despite having more than ten years of restriction. I believe that long-term monitoring programs are an important tool for conservation and management efforts and I find no defects in the manuscript x what I consider to approve.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Review of Shelledy et al. 2023: Rockfish trends in Puget Sound 2009-2023

 

General Comments

 

This is a concisely written study on population trends of rockfish in Washington's Puget Sound. While the findings were inconclusive in determining the overall impacts of the rockfish fishing ban, there were clear decreases over time for Copper rockfish limited to one sub-basin. Further exploration of the potential causes behind this decline would be a helpful addition to the discussion. No clear effects of the fishing ban or other environmental factors were observed.

 

Specific Comments

 

Line 23: Suggest: "investigation into what factors besides fishing may be driving the trends reported here."

 

Line 38: I argue that rockfish are not charismatic megafauna, suggest instead "As important meso-predators"

 

Line 162: What is the justification for grouping sites by basin? Can you provide environmental data or similar to defend this decision?

 

Line 306: It is worth mentioning a third possibility, that your sampling methods were insufficient to quantify rockfish populations and their trends over time. You mention citizen science and government-ran programs for censuses in lines 331-332, could you compare your results to their findings? You also mention anecdotal reports from fishers that could be quantified and compared to your findings.

 

Line 362: I understand this limitation, but you could use the data from aforementioned government and citizen science monitoring efforts that spanned the fishing moratorium to also test for fishing effects on population dynamics

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors,

 

First of all, congratulations for your work. Although there are some shortcomings in the study, I hope that they can be easily corrected by you. Required corrections are listed below.

Comments:

Title: Title should be edited as "Rockfish species trends in Puget Sound 2009-2023."

Introduction: While giving the scientific names of the species, first the genus name should be given in full and it should be stated in the person who first defined the species.

Materials and Methods: There are deficiencies in the Materials and Methods section of the paper. It is seen that it is not clearly stated how the rock fish species recorded with the camera are identified later and how the adult individuals are determined. Morphological differences of rockfish species from each other were not mentioned in the study.

Rock fish species were defined according to whom? Scientific reference or references should be given.

 

Best wishes

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I am happy with the changes made by the author. The only concern remains that "If we were looking at projected counts, it would be valuable to do modeling that controls for ‘season’ and ‘location’ among other parameters. For our purposes, a simple correlation is sufficient to answer our question (are we seeing a change in rockfish over time?) rather than a more sophisticated analysis" actually the simple correlation made and relationship between variables in driven by site. Moreover, since you demonstrate very different temporal coverage within the areas showing different trends in rockfish abundance, it leads to wrong conclusions, where you demonstrate overall trend. I am satisfied with trends in various sites separately, but the overall trend is simply wrong.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf