Ecology of Gamebirds in Namha National Protected Area, Lao People’s Democratic Republic
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
birds-1459181
Ecology of Gamebirds in Namha National Protected 2 Area, Lao PDR
I read with great interest the revised version of the above manuscript. I would like to start by congratulating the authors for the great job they did in revising the manuscript. In its current version it reads much better.
I have one min issue linked with the method used to run the occupancy analysis (see below). For the rest I only have minor issues.
Main comment
Using Occupancy to analyze the data (paragraph starting at L177) is a very nice addition to the manuscript. However, there could be an issue to the way the authors use to define camera independence, assuming by this they define that individual caught in two cameras are different animals (or should not be the same animals). On L210 they mention that they consider cameras located at 300m apart as independent. As this could be fine for partridge (see later in this comments) it violate the independence assumption in pheasants, such as the silver pheasant analyzed in this manuscript. Suwanrat et al (2015 Global Ecology and Conservation 3: 596-606) use 700 m apart for Siamese fireback following home range size obtained by telemetry data from Sukumal et al (2010 Raffle Bulletin of Zoology 58: 391-401). Siamese fireback and Silver pheasant have similar home range size, and follow a similar seasonal ranging behavior pattern in both males and females. Therefore, camera spacing at 300m is most likely violate the occupancy assumption as two adjacent camera traps will not be independent. One solution could be to only consider detection from one out of two camera traps (assuming the dataset is large enough).
On the other hand, as mentioned, 300m apart should represent independence for partridges which have been reported to have smaller home ranges. For example, between 112-138 m home range radius in scaly breasted partridge (Ong-in et al 2020 Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 68: 646-472 and Chhin et al 2020 raffles Bulletin of Zoology 68: 308-318) and 99 and 134 m for Chestnut headed partridge (Chinn et al, 2020). We can assume that other partridges might fit within a similar home range size. Unfortunately, not enough detections appear to be available for partridge. This low detection is actually a very interesting, and concerning, result. Partridge have been understudied in the region and most of the species are labeled as “Least Concern”. However, recent direct and indirect surveys (the one using by product data) show very little detections of them despite being highly territorial and therefore assumed to pass a camera trap multiple times. The result here presented support the possibility that the whole group is far more threatened than what thought. Hunting pressure is high as animal are often caught using dicoid (the group is highly territorial and call out loud). Moreover, they have a monogamous structure meaning that the hunting of one of the two animals within a social unit will eliminate any chance of reproduction for a given season. In the end, it is my opinion but I do not have data on it, the group seems to be far less tolerant to habitat degradation than the pheasant, argues and peafowl in the region.
Minor comments
L39: I suggest add “Galliformes” as a keyword. The authors use in the manuscript the word “Gamebird”, however, most of the study published recently for southeast Asia refer to the group as Galliformes.
L76-85: as the author mention this in the text and the answer to my previous comments it should be mentioned here that CT data are a byproduct of a general diversity surveys.
This is actually not a trivial matter as there are several surveys conducted in the region and the by-data from galliformes tend to be ignored. This might not be an issue with partridge and peacock pheasant where survey using their loud call are preferred, but definitely for Lophura species camera traps is the way to go and start looking at all the by-data could provide a good baseline information… It will be great to make this clear as an outcome from this paper so that more by product data will be analyzed.
L148: I will specifically mention that partridge will fall in the “small birds”, which unfortunately is the case which is why most the species are massively understudied in the region as by data are very limited.
L442-447: Here you can look at what reported for Siamese Fireback, which are sympatric and show similar social dynamic with Silver pheasant in Thailand (i.e. Sukumal etal, 2010)
L480: as well as between orange necked partridge and Germain’s peacocok pheasant (Nguyen et al 2017 Raffle Bulletin of Zoology 65: 60-67).
Table 1: As the paper is focusing on Galliforme (or Gamebirds) I suggest moving other species now in the table in supplementary materials.
Author Response
Rev. 1
I read with great interest the revised version of the above manuscript. I would like to start by congratulating the authors for the great job they did in revising the manuscript. In its current version it reads much better.
I have one min issue linked with the method used to run the occupancy analysis (see below). For the rest I only have minor issues.
Main comment
Using Occupancy to analyze the data (paragraph starting at L177) is a very nice addition to the manuscript. However, there could be an issue to the way the authors use to define camera independence, assuming by this they define that individual caught in two cameras are different animals (or should not be the same animals). On L210 they mention that they consider cameras located at 300m apart as independent. As this could be fine for partridge (see later in this comments) it violate the independence assumption in pheasants, such as the silver pheasant analyzed in this manuscript. Suwanrat et al (2015 Global Ecology and Conservation 3: 596-606) use 700 m apart for Siamese fireback following home range size obtained by telemetry data from Sukumal et al (2010 Raffle Bulletin of Zoology 58: 391-401). Siamese fireback and Silver pheasant have similar home range size, and follow a similar seasonal ranging behavior pattern in both males and females. Therefore, camera spacing at 300m is most likely violate the occupancy assumption as two adjacent camera traps will not be independent. One solution could be to only consider detection from one out of two camera traps (assuming the dataset is large enough).
On the other hand, as mentioned, 300m apart should represent independence for partridges which have been reported to have smaller home ranges. For example, between 112-138 m home range radius in scaly breasted partridge (Ong-in et al 2020 Raffles Bulletin of Zoology 68: 646-472 and Chhin et al 2020 raffles Bulletin of Zoology 68: 308-318) and 99 and 134 m for Chestnut headed partridge (Chinn et al, 2020). We can assume that other partridges might fit within a similar home range size. Unfortunately, not enough detections appear to be available for partridge.
We repeated the model analysis with a subset of 48 camera stations that are all at least 700 m apart. With this reduced sample size, autocorrelation reduces effective sample size even further, and not all of the associations reported previously are significant, although some conclusions can still be drawn for the three species of pheasants.
This low detection is actually a very interesting, and concerning, result. Partridge have been understudied in the region and most of the species are labeled as “Least Concern”. However, recent direct and indirect surveys (the one using by product data) show very little detections of them despite being highly territorial and therefore assumed to pass a camera trap multiple times. The result here presented support the possibility that the whole group is far more threatened than what thought. Hunting pressure is high as animal are often caught using dicoid (the group is highly territorial and call out loud). Moreover, they have a monogamous structure meaning that the hunting of one of the two animals within a social unit will eliminate any chance of reproduction for a given season. In the end, it is my opinion but I do not have data on it, the group seems to be far less tolerant to habitat degradation than the pheasant, argues and peafowl in the region.
Thank you for the suggestion. We have expanded the 3rd para. of Discussion, as well as added a final section (Conclusions) to discuss partridges, emphasizing the possibility of their rarity and the need for further study.
Minor comments
L39: I suggest add “Galliformes” as a keyword. The authors use in the manuscript the word “Gamebird”, however, most of the study published recently for southeast Asia refer to the group as Galliformes.
Done
L76-85: as the author mention this in the text and the answer to my previous comments it should be mentioned here that CT data are a byproduct of a general diversity surveys.
This is actually not a trivial matter as there are several surveys conducted in the region and the by-data from galliformes tend to be ignored. This might not be an issue with partridge and peacock pheasant where survey using their loud call are preferred, but definitely for Lophura species camera traps is the way to go and start looking at all the by-data could provide a good baseline information… It will be great to make this clear as an outcome from this paper so that more by product data will be analyzed.
Done – the last sentence of that paragraph was appended as: “We were fortunate to opportune data sets for both of these species, thanks to the utilization of camera trap data that were bycatch from general diversity surveys (Bleisch and Souliya, 2015).”
L147: I will specifically mention that partridge will fall in the “small birds”, which unfortunately is the case which is why most the species are massively understudied in the region as by data are very limited.
Agreed, and we noted this (3rd paragraph of Discussion etc)
L442-447: Here you can look at what reported for Siamese Fireback, which are sympatric and show similar social dynamic with Silver pheasant in Thailand (i.e. Sukumal etal, 2010)
Thank you for this. Respectfully, we are not comfortable comparing our findings with a different species (L. diardi in this case).
L480: as well as between orange necked partridge and Germain’s peacocok pheasant (Nguyen et al 2017 Raffle Bulletin of Zoology 65: 60-67).
Thank you! Under the Discussion of Species Associations, we modified the last sentence to include the study (Vy et al. 2017), which was also added to the list of citations at the end. “In addition to multiple associations noted by Beebe (1936), there have been other noted species associations, including Arborophila partridges in Cambodia (Chhin et al. 2020), Arborophila and Tropicoperdix partridges in Viet Nam (Vy et al. 2017), and Siamese Fireback L. diardi and Silver Pheasant in Thailand (Savini and Sukumal 2009).”
Table 1: As the paper is focusing on Galliforme (or Gamebirds) I suggest moving other species now in the table in supplementary materials.
Done and added Supplementary Table 6.
Reviewer 2 Report
This is a well-written manuscript that would be of interest to the wildlife conservation community.
Author Response
Thank you for your review!
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
birds-1337300-peer-review-v1
Bio-ecology of Gamebirds in Namha National Protected Area, Lao PDR
In this manuscript the authors are using camera-trap data to “describe general biology and ecology of several species of gamebirds and assess species coexistence in Namha National Protected Area in Luang Namtha Province, Lao PDR” (L13-15). In itself the approach could be very interesting but, it will require a very high number of detections over a large number of camera trap locations. Unfortunately, this is not the case in this manuscript where the number of detections is rather small and mostly clustered in few camera trap locations.
As a consequence the manuscript in its current form has major problems related with 1) the interpretations of the results presented, 2) the method used and, 3) in few cases, with an apparent lack of understanding by the authors of the species studied.
1) Continuously over the whole manuscript the authors talk about “annual resident” and “non-annual resident”. All galliformes in mainland southeast Asia are resident species, meaning that they do not migrate at any time period over a year or at any significant distance from their annual range. While it is true that some Sundaic species are suspected to be nomadic mainly during mast fruiting period when they follow bearded pigs and sun bears (i.e. Bulwer's pheasant, Lophura bulweri) this is not the case in the Indoburma region.
What the authors are doing is simply misinterpreting the annual variation in the species detection probability with possible short distance migration. This is the consequence of the small sample size they have, which is related to the camera trap setting (see my comment 2 here below) and to the high hunting pressure and disturbance in the area (see the conclusion L365-389). Hunting and disturbance, beside reducing species density, have been reported to accentuate some of their ranging behavior during the non-breeding season when animal tend to concentrate their ranging in small, densely vegetated, portion of their home range.
I have highlighted below (detailed comments) where the issue appears im the text. The authors must absolutely fix this by removing any reference to annual and non-annual residence.
2) The authors have positioned their camera traps at 1m height. While this has been extensively recommended for large mammals (i.e. tigers and their pray) it is not ideal for smaller animals, among which Galliformes. For small species, including galliformes, using 40 cm height is recommended. The problem of camera traps set at 1 m is that there is a high chance to miss a large proportion of galliformes individuals. Animal passing to close to the camera traps are missed as they simply get under the detector and so are animals passing further away as the detector sensitivity is weaker. The data set here presented is therefore an under-representation of what actually available in the forest. As a consequence, while the presence results, as well as any eventual special distribution of the focus species, can be accepted, all attempt to explain the general biology and ecology of the species end up making little to no sense and therefore being little informative and misleading.
3) Perhaps with the exception of silver pheasant the authors have far too little detection to be able to say anything on the daily activity pattern. They should remove all is mention for the other 5 species as what presented is highly speculative and therefore little informative.
4) As for the above comment, species association is also little informative as the authors can only present a handful of pictures taken at the same place. While this could show that some species combinations do occur, it cannot exclude that other species combinations could not occur. Unfortunately, the associations presented are nothing new. Remove the whole part both from results (L227-245) and discussion (L347-363).
5) In the end, the authors refer here and there to “abundance” (see below detailed comments).
This is highly misleading as nowhere in the method or the result sections they estimate abundance. What the author report is simply the number of independent detections/photographs. By the way nowhere it is reported how independent detections were defined.
I recommend the authors to at least run occupancy for the red junglefowl, silver and gray peacock pheasant, as those are actually valuable data and the available sample size seams large enough. However, there could be an issue with camera traps location, which could violate some of the analysis’ assumptions, but as the authors missed to provide any such details I cannot evaluate this at the moment.
Detailed comments
L18-19, 32, 34, and 37: remove everything related to annual residence or year-round presence (see comment 1).
L53: provide reference. Galliformes are not particularly great seed dispersers as they are mostly granivore, and therefore mainly seed predators rather than dispersers.
L50-59: perhaps some more updated references in this first paragraph will be desirable.
L126-127: see my second major comment regarding the height at which camera traps are located and what is the problem with your design.
L120-148: Please provide details on how far apart camera traps were located. As all the Galliformes species you detected are either territorial all year round (partridge) or occupy the same area all year round, there is a very high possibility that the animals you record over and over at the same location are the same animals. If this is the case the number of independent photograph in itself does not provide any idea of how many animals are in the area.
L151: How did you define that the animal in the picture was a 75% grown subadult? Please explain so in great details so that the method could be replicated.
L169: How you define “independence” in detection. You do not explain it anywhere but you keep refer to this.
L178: It is not a “peak of abundance” (which by the way you do not estimate), it is more likely a “peak of detections” which is absolutely not the same thing. The first imply that the species density in the area change seasonally (which for Junglefowl, and all other Galliformes in the region, is absolutely not the case) while the second assume that the species density will stay the same but that you simply do not detect animals (which is your case). All Galliformes species in the region reduce their activity after the mating season while females are on nest and with chickes.
Following this, the legend of Figure 3 is also wrong as the same issue describe above is also true for silver and gray peacock pheasant.
L186-187: Well, say this with only 22 photos of what should be a very common species its very very speculative. Remove the sentence. Also Figure 4 mean rather little (perhaps with the exception of silver pheasant), remove it as well.
L195: again, define “independence” in detections
L197-198: again, remove what related to “annual resident”
L198: again, not peak abundance but peak detectability.
L214: again define “independent”
L217-218: again, remove what related to residence.
L227-245: With the very few detections you have for most of the species, due both to your camera trap setting at 1m height and most likely to an overall low density due to hunting, this whole set of results make little to no sense. Please remove.
L247: Nowhere in the method and results you are estimating species abundances…
L275-282: Please remove this whole paragraph as, with the little detection you have, what you present is purely speculative and can mislead future knowledge of the species.
L284-288: again, remove as based on too little detections.
L295: remove “annual resident”.
L304-307: The whole paragraph is confusing. What are you trying to say? What do you mean by “novel age class”?
L308-313: Silver pheasant start grouping in January and stay so until early May (mating season) when female move away as they start sitting on nest and male start moving solitary until December. After chick hatches, female tend to move on very small home range in dense undergrowth before joining again with males around December. First year males tend to travel solitary for the whole year although during the mating season they tend to travel at the edge of mating groups.
L324: remove “non annual resident”.
L334: again, what do you mean by “novel age class estimate”?
L347-363: as for the result section remove this as your detections are too few to say anything meaningful on this
L365-389: This is rather a description of the site then a conclusion to this work. The authors could have easily written it without conducting any survey.
I suggest moving the whole part either in the introduction, when explaining why the survey is needed, or in the “study site” section to introduce the threat to the study species.
Reviewer 2 Report
Submitted is a well-written article about the use of remote camera traps to document rarely observed species in and near a protected area of Laos. The method was effective at documenting the occurrence of rare game species, as well as documenting seasonal differences in detection, relative abundance and identification of nest predators.
Is it possible to spell out PDR (People's Democratic Republic?)
Line 50-51: This is a very awkwardly worded opening sentence and could be altered slightly to read better.
The number of photos or hours of photo review should be added to the methods, in addition to the number if different footage reviewers.
Mitigation measures regarding egg predation documented by the camera traps could be discussed more and included within the conservation section.
Overall this is a good manuscript that would be of interest to a wide audience and is a great example of utilizing a non-invasive and relatively inexpensive technique to monitor rare species in a resource-limited environment.
Reviewer 3 Report
I read the ms with interest, particularly that all information provided was new for me. The ms is well written and – I believe – contains some new data on these birds and perhaps could be published. Still, however, I think it can be improved.
First, I miss something I would call ‘the background’, which is now reduced to a statement that there were few studies on focal species in Lao PDR. Just this seems insufficient to me, as I’d like to know more at the start of reading. For example, how many species of pheasants and partiridges are known or documented to occur in Lao PDR, and in the study area? Is the study area or region important for any of them, i.e., hold substantial numbers or are refugee? How many of them did you record with camera – important while concluding the coverage of your study (i.e., are there any more known or expected to occur that you did not record?) – is it full, moderate or weak, could you expect some more species to be camera-recorded? What is their biology, i.e., what do they do over the year? Are they sedentary or perform a kind of migratory movements (vertical, other) and when, where and how do they breed? You provide a piece of this in the Abstract, saying that e.g., Rufous-throated partridge breed in early November; where does this knowledge come from? There’s no mention on this in the main text and it would be nice to both provide this such information in a systematic manner somewhere. When do other species breed? You say activity in April may reflect the beginning of the breeding season, which suggest species differ in breeding time. And so on, there quite a lot of background knowledge to be given systematically to provide the necessary minimum to the reader – what do you study, and why. Next, are they species of conservation concern? What is your particular aim in reporting your observations from cameras, i.e., what specific gaps in knowledge do you attempt to fill? Etc. adding such information in the Introduction would allow to better place your study in the context.
Second, I believe there is a possibility to address some habitat prefs of these species particularly, that you have several habitat characteristics in places around the camera traps. You now use them just to provide means computed for places where a species was recorded (and nothing else). It obviously misses the stations where your cameras did not record a species (and these two measures combined provide a basis for the simplest possible comparison – which is already quite informative about what do birds like and wht they don’t). These data could be well used to try some modelling, at there is a huge number of possible models one could apply here. At least for more common species this is possible and I think this needs some more work.
Detailed comments
Title
I am not sure if “Bio-ecology” is the right term. It is more frequently (though rarely, after all) used in where economics and technology meet environment. Perhaps consider a better term here.
Simple summary
Line 16: missing “i”
Line 16-17: I couldn’t find any information in the ms, that mentioned species of partridges do not utilize the same area (‘avoiding competition’) – and to me, if one states such things in a summary or abstract, it needs to be shown somehow (proved or suggested) in the paper
Line 19: instead of basing statements on raw data, it is better tested statistically that there were biased sex ratios. A simple binomial test provides an answer if, given sample size, it is justified to say there were ‘more’ of any sex or the difference is too small to conclude it occurs at all
Lines 25-26: well, I cannot see any particular recommendations stemming from your study particularly, that the ‘Conservation’ section, the last one in the paper seems to be loosely linked to the ms itself. Actually, without doing some modelling that would explain some ‘preferences’ we cannot even say what niches these species use for living, like if they prever less on more forested areas, elevations on which they seem to live, or whether they seem to avoid humans.
Abstract:
Line 37: if a species is not an annual resident, what is it?
Line 42: “nuclear species” need to be defined, what does it mean?
Line 42: “associated sexes varying among species” – say how they vary instead of just saying there is variation (if important)
Line 43: while this is probably obvious for the Authors, the readers need to know when the breeding season of these birds is – which could be given in an additional info on biology when added.
Introduction
Lines 64-66: Johnson et al. (2006) study: nice, but better say what did they show with this study
Lines 66-68: instead if saying who investigated what, say what the main findings are (Rasphone et al. 2019); the parameters mentioned here need to be estimated from data with specialised models, not ‘investigated’ as would be raw data
Lines 69-71: Brickle review. Summarize this shortly: i.e., how many species there are, how many are threatened, what are the main threats? Stating that somebody reviewed something without giving anything more say virtually nothing to the reader
Line 82: autoecological means what?
Methods
Line 104: label to the Figure 1, double dot
Line 105-113: section on predators. You do not seem to use these data any more in any way. Is it necessary, and if so, for what?
Line 122: some clarity is needed in respect to the number of stations and their coverage. 77 stations, ok, but all 77 worked in both your study periods, so that this is a ‘total’? Or each only once? (e.g., 43 on one period and 34 in the second one?)
Lines 136-148: you do not seem to use these abiotic ‘parameters’ anywhere except for providing means for the stations which recorded a given species. At the same time you mention several potentially important parameters which could help explaining occurrence of species in your sample of locations (like aspect, slope, TRI and others). If you don’t use them – which is apparently the case currently – delete this. Or, if you wish, use them in some way: perform some modelling to find out which of these features do explain variation in your data. That would be particularly useful in the conservation context as it could show what is important for these birds.
Results
Line 151: ‘75% grown subadult’ seems odd, but maybe it’s the way in which it is said for galliforms
Line 152: a record made 2.49 km from the village. This is a kind of information that could be included in the model with estimating the relationship of occurrence (probability of recording a species) vs distance to human settlements (just a proxy as it probably explains other things like human or hunting pressure?).
Line 157: singletons, in few other places also, is it the right term to say ‘single individuals’? I have never met this in the literature.
Table 1: to me, this table is better placed in an appendix. It provides nothing but a number of records, but eats two pages. I’d also like to see marked the status of these birds (i.e., threat category or something like this) so that the importance of the records is immediately clear
Line 169: ‘independent events’. It is to be defined first – what is meant by ‘independent’. This is repeated in few other places
Line 179: peak of abundnace or activity? Are you able to distinguish between these two? Furhter, without providing some information on breeding biology first, the statement that this peak reflects the beginning of the breeding season comes as a surprise. Why do you expect the birds to be more active at that time? What do they do to be more likely to be recorded by cameras? It is important that this information-knowledge is presented so that the reader knows where your conclusions come from
Figure 3: Actually, the basic data on cameras working in the two periods are given in the Methods in such a general way, that it is impossible for the reader to become convinced if the figure presents unbiased picture. As far as I can understand, these monthly dynamics are just the raw numbers of events recorded. But not all months have the same coverage due to the periods not being exactly the same. To get picture unbiased, one needs to express the number of events per camera-days (i.e., the number of days cameras effectively worked) or another effort measure. This is trivial to be done in the Poisson model where such effort is simple added to an intercept as log offset (one can even do it by hand and the express n events per, e.g., a month, that is, 30 camera working days). I would strongly suggest reanalyzing these data properly and draw a figure with a standardized n events.
Lines 227-245: Species Associations. Before one can draw a conclusion there ARE associations, one needs to present an evidence for it. What we find here, however, is just a table with time-lags and one has to conlude herself if it suggests something or not and the associated text saying ‘temporal species associations were recorded’. It remains unknown what the Authors call ‘an association’, how is it defined (e.g., 10, 20, 35, 44 or 60 min time lag is still sufficient, but 64 or 80 min is too long? Why?) and analyzed. So this definitely requires some more thinking and some more work. What I would do is a simulation, if I can suggest. A simulation is perhaps the simplest way to get an evidence on whether there seems to be an association among your records. Given you have the number of records of these species and their distribution in time (and space), which is your empirical distribution, you can assume the ‘events’ occur randomly across time (and space) - a default assumption. Now if you can prove observed patterns differ from a random one significantly, then your conslusion is correct, there are associations (probably), or, at the very least, the observed patterns are non-random and thus unlikely to arise by chance. Just simulate your system: a camera working across n days, which records n events of k species expected to occur in association. Allocate them randomly along the time axis and see how often you get events so close in time (or closer) as your observed records. Since as you write, some species are virtually absent outside breeding season, it would be nice to know if these include species noted in ‘associations’ – if this is the case you can restrict their occurrence to predefined time window to get a system more realistic (breeding season; see Line 243, where you say that majority of associations recorded were during breeding time). Repeat simulation many times to get long-term averages and compute P’s (probability of observing events as close in time as in your empirical data by chance). If your result is that you get this quite often, then it is likely it arose by chance and there is no association. At the moment, I find your conclusion not fully justified.
Discussion and Conclusions
Lines 261-266: partridges. Are there any more species of partridges expected to occur in the area? If so, and the richness of this group is bigger than you recroded, perhaps using a rarefaction curve (methods developed by Chao and others) is worth considering. This would give you an indication of whether you missed species that do occur, or perhaps your coverage is sufficient and any more species is unlikely there.
Lines 267-282: the second and the third sentences in this paragraph should actually be model results, not just raw data.
Line 285: this is where one finds out they’re going to roost around 6 pm. Do they roost communally, or solitarily?
Line 301: ‘slightly’ disputable (a 30% difference is rather a large value); as said a binomial tests would allow to conclude if there is more of any sex
Lines 304-307: be clear estimates of yearling males proportion was completely unknown before; what is the meaning of this finding? Also, what is the meaning and importance of the fact, that males can moult rectrices in mid August?
Line 324: if peacock pheasants were not annual resident, what were they?
Line 350: ‘primary nuclear species’ need explanation as said before
Conservation
Lines 365-389: No direct reference to your results appears here, so that the paragraph looks to be on gamebird threats in general. Are you able to include some of your findings into the ‘conservation’ section of the paper?
Author Contributions
Line 401: I am not sure what is meant by ‘LX led RS and DEM analysis’. I could not find any analyses in the paper.
