Impact of Fires on Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs) and Priority Bird Species for Conservation in Bolivia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is well written and only one minor grammatical error was detected:

line 105 should say 'birds' rather than 'the birds'

The paper is suitable for publication in its current form however it could be improved in a few ways.

My main criticism is that the comparison of fire history and KBAs is quite course as it doesn't seem to consider the different habitats that occur within the KBAs and what the natural/historical/traditional fire regimes of these habitats might be. For example, grasslands and savannas around the world naturally have a high fire frequency whereas closed forests may rarely burn. Simply listing the fire history of a KBA without reference to habitat has no meaning. As a reader I am curious to know whether KBAs are based on single or multiple habitat types but no such information is provided.

I would encourage the authors to further stratify their study by habitat type (both inside and outside the KBAs). They could also set some mean fire history parameters for each habitat (or perhaps a threshold for particular bird species) and consider whether the current regime is within this parameter or not. That would then provide a means of considering whether the current fire regime is an issue or not for birds or biodiversity generally.

In the discussion the authors do talk about natural fire regimes, habitats and how how these relate to bird species so they have considered the topic to some degree. However, their analysis does not lend well to completing this discussion.

In some instances fire is clearly a threatening factor (e.g. when part of slash and burn or land-clearing) however, fire is also a natural process that may be beneficial or benign to some habitats or species. The authors discuss elements of this topic however the way the analysis is framed does not provide a means to assess whether current fire regimes are an issue or not.

Author Response

Thanks for your positive assessment and constructive comments of the manuscript. These comments have contributed significantly to improve the manuscript’s readability and clarity. Herein, we include a detailed response to all your comments.

In the results, we have added a new analysis to differentiate the impact of fires on forested and non-forested ecosystems in Bolivia and the KBA. These analyses were performed using the MODIS Land Cover Type Product (MCD12Q1.006). The results show that fires are more recurrent in savannas and grasslands areas. The stratification by ecosystems helped a lot to evaluate which ecosystems are more impacted each year.

Also, in the discussion section we have added some paragraphs that mention fire regimes and their impact on birds in Bolivia. There have been very few studies on this topic so far in the country. We have also included discussion on the impact on forest ecosystems, since regeneration processes are slower.

Reviewer 2 Report

Maillard et al. document the impact of fires on KBAs in Bolivia using avian taxa. I found the paper to be thorough, well-written, and of novel contribution to the field in general and Fire in particular. My main comments for improving presentation are to focus on the specifics of Bolivia more than making general global statements unless absolutely necessary to show context. A few more citations could be provided on the ecosystem benefits of mixed severity fires in places where that is the natural fire system and that Bolivia is not one of those places. The conclusions could be strengthened by including a bit more detail on what could be done to improve conservation in relation to these fire findings. 

My comments are also provided in the comments feature of the pdf and I signed my review. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for his/her assessment of the manuscript and the constructive comments that he/she has provided.

We have made several adjustments to the document based on your suggestions.

There is not much research on studies of fire impacts on birds in Bolivia, so we cannot be very specific. However, we have included everything we have on the subject related to fire and birds for Bolivia.  Until further studies are done we cannot discuss further. Our research was intended to draw the attention of researchers so that they can be guided to conduct specific studies on KBAs and threatened species.

Also, in the conclusions we have included some recommendations of what could be done to improve the conservation of these sites and species based on our results.