Illuminating Firefly Diversity: Trends, Threats and Conservation Strategies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Well-written and valuable contribution to Firefly Conservation.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We are very grateful to the reviewer for their positive assessment and for their careful reading of this manuscript. We have taken many of their stylistic suggestions and comments, and these have helped to clarify our paper.

We have opted not to employ the Oxford comma except in places where it is required for clarity. In this revision, we have also been more consistent in citation format for online resources.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Your manuscript is very well written and structured, presents key findings and includes many examples of local/regional studies and initiatives, and provides a synthesis of key messages to improve the knowledge and conservation of lampyrids. I include my comments, corrections and suggestions in a revised version of the ms (attached pdf) and just state here some points for you to consider:

- You may provide some guidance on the lampyrid groups that are in much need of taxonomic revision (e.g. genera);

- You may provide some information on species diet, particularly if some lampyrid species are specialists;

- You should include a figure summarizing the main threats to Lampyridae at global scale since will help readers. I know that there is a recent paper on the subject (with a regional analysis), but the large section 3 of your manuscript will improve with this visual synthesis.

- Invasive species are not listed as a main threat to lampyrids. Is this a fact or just the lack of data? I thought that some invasive (riparian) plants could be problematic. Also, invasive fish and crustaceans may prey upon the aquatic larvae.

- I think that is ok to provide some detail on the IUCN categories to help interpretation of your results (lines 409-416), but providing details on the assessment procedure using criterion B seems unnecessary and out of scope of the manuscript (lines 431-444).

- Suppl. table 1 :

- better to keep just the species name, author and date of description in column B without stating the source (In …) and reference code (which is in a following column). Also state all species authors (avoiding et al.) and use & (not both “&” and “and”).

- In sheet “species count analysis” correct 2003 to 2030

 Best wishes

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We are grateful to Reviewer 2 for their thoughtful reading of this manuscript and for their extremely helpful comments and suggestions, many of which we have now incorporated as detailed in our response (attached).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx