Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Howdy! 

It was a pleasure to review the manuscript 'Going Batty: The Challenges And Opportunities For Drone Researchers In Monitoring Behaviour And Habitat Use Of Rays' from Semonn Oleksyn et al. 

I think a review focused on the use of drones to study ray behaviour and habitat use in nearshore waters will contribute to the marine field, but I suggest major revisions to this current narrative before publication. I hope my comments below and on the PDF are purely helpful.

This manuscript needs a major narrative structure revision and multiple writing edits. I think a lot of the text was from a literature review or first chapter of a thesis that is great knowledge, but might not be needed for this manuscript that has its own narrative and objectives. An example for revisions, the introduction is currently read as a long-winded abstract to the rest of the manuscript (and therefore the manuscript becomes repetitive). I suggest a short, to the point introduction (maybe 3 paragraphs state how drones are used for submersed aquatic animals including rays, some pertinent facts about why a drone might be used over another method option for rays, then the Here we review..... paragraph). There is a lack of explicit ray specific research review (but plenty of citations attached to broad sentences) that, if added, could be helpful to a potential reader (who is this manuscript for??) - suggested habitats, depth, altitude of drone for said question, etc. Lastly, the writing  needs to be more active and concise and less normative as well as conversational-tone. 

SOME POINTS NOT MENTIONED IN REVIEW, suggested to maybe have or delve into to provide more substance to this review and suggested opportunities. 

Explicitly discussing wildlife management opportunities! Maybe this is a section before conclusion. For review of prior research, there might not be too much yet. Personally I know of one that you have cited Hensel et al. 2019 where presence/absence and abundance data of marine megafauna was submitted to  the Bahamian parks service to help establish two park locations that prohibited shoreline development while keeping rec fishing open. This information is in public media presses about the article. SO - not a ping to cite this paper (again) just an example I know about and maybe a little searching will lead to more wildlife management use of drones- if not ray specific maybe nearshore or other aquatic fauna. 

For any research using a drone, research should probably determine detection probability (dp) and identifying other limitations: 

• • DP over a habitat (sand vs. sand with sponges vs. seagrass)
  • DP per species
  • DP per site for said species (depth, turbidity, etc.)
    • for rays, resting or resting buried in sand is hard to detect. 
  • DP limitations potentially from docks, mangrove/other plant canopy
  • limitation of what behaviours can be repeatedly observed and measured. For example, is a study's objective only measuring dirurnal behaviours and habitat use? Then a drone is a great method. Other potentially: can't observe during storms, rough days, maybe this doesn't matter though. 

For ray research specifically 

• • while there are limitations to only using a drone and not tags, you can gather a lot of habitat use data, what is used, how often, pretty inexpensively providing helpful data to parks service/ wildlife management for potential protected areas (an objective of this journal's issue) which is not explicitly mentioned or discussed too much in this manuscript
  • suggested drone type, altitiude, recorded video vs time lapse images, etc to use based on reviewing publications. Maybe even habitats, depths, time of day, tide cycles, etc. 
  • Are particular behaviours easy to record than others with drones (thinking about a ray feeding station paper I've seen)

TITLE

edit suggestion: change up and remove 'drone researchers' from title.  Keep this batty and ecologically focused :). maybe something with Opp and Chall using drones to study ray behaviour and habitat use in nearshore waters 

INTRODUCTION

The introduction largely focuses on broad topics for drones and as a reader, I felt the main purpose of this introduction was to pitch why a drone was better than another method. I don't think this is the entire purpose of these paragraphs and should be condensed, omitted, etc. 

POST-INTRODUCTION

• either clearly distinguish between these two "review evaluates the use of drones in monitoring the behaviour and habitat use of rays, exploring opportunities for innovative applications of drones" or re-write this to reflect what is covered in part 2. 
• I think bringing up the issue about regulations, permits, etc. is VERY important and an issue that needs attention and future policy change. I enjoyed seeing this in the manuscript.
• combine the problems and solutions maybe to help reduce long-winded explanations. I have specifics in a comment on the pdf. I would really omit the paragraph about a fatigued drone pilot. This is maybe a sentence of caution for manual driving drones. 

 

Rees, Alan F., et al. "The potential of unmanned aerial systems for sea turtle research and conservation: a review and future directions." Endangered Species Research 35 (2018): 81-100.

- this may be helpful for narrative outline post-intro. they also have a long-winded intro that I don't think is needed in new pubs regarding consumer-grade drones and ecological research. This has been pretty well laid out in several pubs now inc this suggested one. Let's move forward! :) 

 

I look forward to seeing the revised manuscript, and I again I hope these edits are helpful! 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer 1 (R1):

Thank you for your thoughtful and constructive feedback. Your encouraging tone was greatly appreciated! We attempted to incorporate much of your feedback and feel that it has greatly improved the paper. In particular, we tried to be more concise throughout, while adding more specific examples and recommendations relevant to rays. We also reduced the negative discussion of other techniques. A more detailed point-by-point response is listed in the table within the attached document. 

Once again, thank you for your insightful comments. We appreciate the time and effort that went into this review. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents an overview on the applicability of drones to map rays and the habitats associated with these species. The paper is written as a review of the current state of technology specifically for these species.  Given this goal, the paper falls short on providing readers with specifics to help with mapping these species, mapping habitats, and the technical aspects of drone work that would help others conduct similar types of data collection and processing. As I read and digested each section of the paper I kept hoping to see specific examples from the literature and ultimately a set guidelines in the conclusions that would help scientists use drone technology and drone experts to develop the technology to help map these species, and others, in the nearshore shallow water environment. Instead, the paper is too general and does not provide evidence of any substance. For example, how have other studies of rays used drones to investigate, map, and spatially analyze behavior? There was no detailed assessment of what has worked and what has not worked.  There was no description of places where this technology has worked versus other places that have not worked.  What specific habitats (hard-bottoms, sand, SAV, etc.) have been mapped well using drones and how does this relate to ray preference? There are references to many papers, but the information summarizing these papers is needed. I recommend that the authors go through each section, edit the general content, which is excellent but too wordy, and add specific content from the literature (this is a review paper not original research) that will help the reader to 1) purchase appropriate drones, sensors, and software, 2) design drone missions for different types of mapping goals (video surveillance, photogrammetry, etc.), 3) interpret (manually, semi-automated and automated) and derive pertinent information and 4) assess the accuracy of the results.  This paper needs substantial work in order for it to have information that is useful. As it currently stands, the paper is grammatically well prepared, but it lacks substance or specifics that readers will need. I look forward to reviewing an updated version of this paper because with these updates it will provide a much-needed contribution to drone mapping of coastal environments.

Please see the enclosed PDF where I have highlighted and added comments.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reviewer 2 (R2):

Thank you for your thorough review of this manuscript. We appreciate your constructive feedback and have attempted to incorporate the majority. In particular, we focused on providing the specific examples that would help ray researchers to utilise drones. We hope that the revisions have addressed your comments appropriately, with point-by-point responses included within the table in the attached file. 

Once again, thank you for the time and effort that went into reviewing this paper.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

General Comments:

This review is well researched and provides a good summary of the utility of drones for observational study of stingrays. The review also appeals to a broader readership with information on operational requirements, regulations and habitat mapping, in the context of ray research.

The term "Drones" as used throughout the review needs definition- it appears to be limited to review of only rotary drones, but this needs to be specified given that "drone" could refer to a number of systems including: fixed wing UAVs, Aerostats, underwater drones. It is fine if the authors are not reviewing these other "drones" but the drone type and specifications they are reviewing needs to be clearly specified.

At times, the article presents points about the use of drones in an overly positive manner, rather than acting as an impartial summary of previous research.

 

Specific comments:

This may be a journal issue, but I view the manuscript difficult to review without line numbers to refer to in comments.

 

TITLE

I don’t think “Going Batty” is general enough to be immediately understood outside the field of marine biology and may confuse readers (Batty refers to a colloquial form of Batoidea which is a superorder of cartilaginous fish). I would recommend removal.

ABSTRACT

Nice, clear summary of the work.

SECTION 1

Good introduction.

Review Cites itself 26, I suspect this is an error.

SECTION 2.2

This paragraph jumps around a bit, I recommend keeping the focus on the specific utility of mapping areas of direct relevance to rays. For example, in the following sentences it is not clear the relevance to rays as they are rarely if ever found on the intertidal rocky shore: “Drones have also been used to establish distribution patterns of organisms on intertidal rocky shores[47].”

I recommend linking each example directly back to rays and their habitat, and, if the example is not relevant, remove.

 

"Thermal imaging from drones has been used to map water temperature heterogeneity across aquatic ecosystems[54.55], a capability that can be employed during nighttime flights. As ray movement may be influenced by water temperature[56], this is particularly relevant to ray research." : The way this is phrased makes it sound like thermal imaging drones can be used to monitor ray movements at night. This seems unlikely and out of place in the introduction unless the authors provide reference to previous literature that covers subsurface animal detection at night. If not, then the reference to nightime flights for observing ray movements with thermal imaging should be removed.

 

3.1

The impact of water depth on data collected from drones on rays needs more detailed consideration and discussion. Given that drones can only track rays in the shallow section of their habitats, the data they collect can only ever represent a small portion of that animals movement and behaviour. Therefore while drones may be a great way to gather data on ray behaviour in shallow water, they will forever by limited by depth in the majority of the animals home range and this needs to be acknowledged. Depth of detection changes with environmental conditions as shown by Adams et al. 2020. Looking at the literature for other fauna, reliable detection depth tends to be ~5 metres water depth.  Butcher et al. reported limited detection of shark analogues beyond 3.5 m using drones. The same is true for other aerial surveillance techniques. Robbins et al. and Westgate et al.  also reported reduced detection ability at depth. These researchers concluded that the maximum deployment depth at which an analogue was detected was 4.3 m and 5 m respectively. I would recommend the authors provide some guidance to the readers with reference to the literature on what depths rays behaviour can be expected to be observed and how the use of drone observations represents a sampling method biased towards shallow depths. Below are the some references to start.

 

Adams, K.R., Gibbs, L., Knott, N.A. et al. Coexisting with sharks: a novel, socially acceptable and non-lethal shark mitigation approach. Sci Rep 10, 17497 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-74270-y

Butcher, P. et al. Beach safety: can drones provide a platform for sighting sharks?. Wildl. Res. 46, 701–712 (2019).

Robbins, W. D., Peddemors, V. M. & Kennelly, S. J. Assessment of shark sighting rates by aerial beach patrols Vol. 38 (NSW Department of Primary Industries Cronulla, NSW Australia, 2012).

Westgate, A. J., Koopman, H. N., Siders, Z. A., Wong, S. N. P. & Ronconi, R. A. Population density and abundance of basking sharks Cetorhinus maximus in the lower Bay of Fundy, Canada. Endanger. Species Res. 23, 177–185. https://doi.org/10.3354/esr00567 (2014).

 

3.2

Here is where the authors should present the maximum limits of depth and visibility as observed in the literature.

The authors neglect to mention another alternative to rotary drones that has been successfully used to monitor stingray behaviour in a coastal environment: Blimps. Please see:

Ruiz-García D, Adams K, Brown H, Davis AR. Determining Stingray Movement Patterns in a Wave-Swept Coastal Zone Using a Blimp for Continuous Aerial Video Surveillance. Fishes. 2020; 5(4):31.

 

“Continuing to publish species-specific protocols can provide effective solutions and problem-solving skills to ray researchers using drones.”

I would argue that this is too specific given the number of batoid species worldwide and general guidelines should be the aim, perhaps with specific exceptions made if a species is found to be highly sensitive to disturbance.

 

3.3

“Although, this decreases the overall coverage that achieved with a single drone flight, is less useful if assessing multiple rays in relation to each other at the same time as mapping if short on time or for questions on opportunistic events such as aggregations, and has a greater likelihood of impacting ray behaviour.”

This sentence is too long, revise.

 

4.1 and 4.2 and 5

Useful sections, no issues.

Author Response

Reviewer 3 (R3):

Thank you for reviewing our work, we greatly appreciate the time and effort it took and feel that your comments have helped to improve our manuscript. We have incorporated the vast majority, with a point-by-point response in the table within the attached file.

Once again, thank you for your constructive and encouraging feedback. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

I would like to congratulate the authors for the extensive bibliographic review focusing on the use of drones for rays monitoring.

Although the authors cited the main techniques and equipment that can be used, no practical results were presented.

The article could be classified as a survey on drones applied to the monitoring of rays.

The article covered everything from possible applications to regulatory issues.

Although about 99 works were visited, I think that this manuscript is not suitable with DRONES 'focus.

Author Response

Reviewer 4 (R4):

Thank you for your comments. We have revised the work and included practical and specific recommendations to aid ray researchers utilising drones. 

Thank you once again for reading our manuscript. 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Hello! 

There has been a lot of improvement on this review - still more to go. 

My main 2 edits: (i) Still revisions for introduction (please see pdf comments). (ii) I reviewed the newest version of this manuscript and approve many of the new script and edited/erased script. My main concern, that might be easiest done by a 'Drones' associate or a brief explanation from primary author is verifying this manuscript is significantly different enough from or helpful addition to Drones most recently published paper "The Drone Revolution of Shark Science: A Review". Specifically compare exact details described, topics covered, and references collected as these are both a review. With a 10-minute comparison it was a little difficult for me to determine if it 100% warrants as a "good addition" to the recently published paper mentioned. I also don't feel I can make that judgement call. What does help this current m.s. is the fact it will keyed/tagged as ray specific as well as only ray examples oppose to other non-flat sharks and sections on habitat mapping. Rays are visually and behavioural different than say a requiem shark shape. 

In addition -  I think the second reviewers detailed points that suggest  more exact examples will help make this m.s. unique from the paper mentioned above. Lines 179-184 and 201-225 are really good examples where the author did a great job with a specific example for said topic. Specifically these examples were very helpful for me to read as an ecologist who uses drone videos and stills to collect data. Lastly, for the reviewer that left a short comment, I disagree that it doesn't belong in this journal. This paper is def addressing  the special issue topic!

 

Overall, edit intro and look throughout paper for some fluidity/concise issues (suggest fresh eyes post edits before resubmission. Also, be sure this m.s.  is obviously unique to the other shark review paper which the suggestions from the previous reviewer will likely help with distinguishing their differences. I agree with the previous reviewer's suggestion on remove more of the broad/ambiguous, slightly unhelpful writing with explicit direction (e.g., Depth range to survey must be determined and is site specific (citation)) or example (e.g., to determine usable survey area one study used a decoy animal to determine max depth at each site to account for site variability in water clarity and benthic habitat (citation)) that indirectly gives directions to reader. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

Once again, thank you for your diligence and enthusiasm in reviewing our manuscript. We greatly appreciate your time and effort, and have made changes according to your latest comments as we continue to improve this manuscript. 

We intensively restructured the introduction with input from multiple authors. We hope that the paragraphs tell a more fluid and succinct narrative now. 

With Dr V Raoult an author on both 'The Drone Revolution of Shark Science: A Review' paper and this manuscript, he was well placed to justify this manuscript as a helpful addition to the literature, adding a brief discussion of this justification to the manuscript at line 41. 

We hope that the latest version of the manuscript responds well to your suggestions. Thank you for your friendly and helpful input. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have substantially added detail to the paper to make it a useful contribution to the field.

Author Response

Thank you for reviewing our manuscript! Much appreciated!!

Reviewer 4 Report

Despite recognizing the merit of the work, from my point of view, I maintain my position that this is not the most suitable journal for this manuscript.

This journal's aims and scope are:

The journal focuses on design and applications of drones, including unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), and Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS), etc.

The main areas are: Design, Develpment and Applications.

We could classify this work as "applications". But honestly, I couldn't see the description of an innovative application at work.

A bibliographic review was presented regarding an excellent application. I didn't find any innovative elements in this manuscript.

Author Response

Thank you for your consideration.

While we appreciate your perspective, given the scope of other papers recently published in this journal, we feel that this manuscript aligns with the focus of this journal.

1. Butcher, P.A., Colefax, A.P., Gorkin, R.A., Kajiura, S.M., López, N.A., Mourier, J., Purcell, C.R., Skomal, G.B., Tucker, J.P., Walsh, A.J. & Williamson, J.E. The Drone Revolution of Shark Science: A Review. Drones, 2021,5(1); 8.
2. Raoult, V., Colefax, A. P., Allan, B. M., Cagnazzi, D., Castelblanco-Martínez, N., Ierodiaconou, D. & Pirotta, V. Operational Protocols for the Use of Drones in Marine Animal Research. Drones, 2020, 4(4), 64.

We have faith that the editor will make the correct decision.

Thanks again.