Quantifying the Impact of Avian Influenza on the Northern Gannet Colony of Bass Rock Using Ultra-High-Resolution Drone Imagery and Deep Learning

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

There is growing interest in using drones to survey wildlife, and especially to provide important status such as alive or dead. The current paper provides an example of determining whether colonial seabirds are alive or dead (using machine learning) after an avian flu outbreak, which is a unique application. I have only relatively minor concerns:

1. You have submitted to the journal "Drones" yet the paper is often more about HPAI than drones. I suggest thinking a little bit about the audience and tweaking the paper to make it obviously interesting to drone researchers. For example, starting the abstract and introduction with the use of drones to detect mortality rather than about HPAI.

2. Describe or at least write out all acronyms at first use in the Abstract (mAP).

3. Given the title of the journal, I think you can use "drone" instead of "UAV", and this is collectively what UAV practitioners are moving towards as being easily understood by a broader audience.

4. The paper ignores the ethical concerns with drone flights. There are many papers that examine the impact of drone flights on seabirds, such as those below. It would be good to place the size and distance of your flights into this context. Could the drone have caused some birds to fly off? 

Irigoin-Lovera, C., Luna, D.M., Acosta, D.A. and Zavalaga, C.B., 2019. Response of colonial Peruvian guano birds to flying UAVs: Effects and feasibility for implementing new population monitoring methods. PeerJ, 7, p.e8129.

Brisson-Curadeau, É., Bird, D., Burke, C., Fifield, D.A., Pace, P., Sherley, R.B. and Elliott, K.H., 2017. Seabird species vary in behavioural response to drone census. Scientific reports, 7(1), p.17884.

Edney, A., Hart, T., Jessopp, M., Banks, A., Clarke, L., Cugniere, L., Elliot, K., Juarez Martinez, I., Kilcoyne, A., Murphy, M. and Nager, R., 2023. Best practices for using drones in seabird monitoring and research. Marine Ornithology, 51(2).

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your feedback, and I agree with all of your points. Below I address each point, and all changes have been tracked in the re-submitted LaTeX file:

1. I tweaked the abstract and the introduction to better highlight the drone focus of this study and introduce that first, rather than HPAI.

2. I wrote out the acronym as requested.

3. I have changed all instances of "UAV" to "drone"

4. In the section "Surveys and data preparation", I have expanded on the practices employed by the drone team to minimise bird disturbance and incorported the references that you recommended.

I hope that you will find these changes acceptable.

Thank you again for your effort,

Amy

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I really appreciated the work which seems well written and detailed. It is certainly of considerable interest for the applications and prospects of using the research.

I just think that the iconography should be scaled down as there are many images, sometimes repetitive or which do not seem to have relevance. Below are my suggestions:

 

I would remove figure 2 and join figure 1 with figure 3.

 

I would also remove figure 9 and figure 10

 

Figure 17 and 18 appear to have the same name; I think the 18 refers to 2023 (please correct): even in this case I would combine them into a single photographic table

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your comments and kind words.

I have made all of the figure changes as suggested, with the exception of combing the two large orthomosaics into a single image. I believe that the reader can best see the distribution of the birds in the colony for each year in the full page images than they would otherwise, as the birds appear so small. I did appreciate that it was suggested in order to further reduce the space taken up by the multiple figures in the paper.

I hope that you will find the rest of the changes acceptable, to be found in the re-submitted LaTeX file.

Kind regards,

Amy