Spatial Shifts in Species Richness in Response to Climate and Environmental Change: An Adaption of the EUROMOVE Model in the Czech Republic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I enjoyed this and I think it will be useful, but there are some problems that need to be addressed. First, I could not work out how the future climate projections were created. The RCPs are inputs to climate models, but you need to say which models were used; they vary widely in their predictions. Moreover, they are inputs to the previous generation of models, CMIP5: why not use the new, CMIP6 generation? And why RCP8.5? This represents a future path from 2007 which we did not take, with no renewables, no replacement of coal by gas and none of the other mitigation actions that have been taken. We are now 15 years past 2007, so we can say for certain that we are NOT on the RCP8.5 path, so why use it? Its use exaggerates the impacts of climate change and makes them less useful. I could also make no sense of the 8 'selected species'. What are 'Poa sp,', 'Salix sp.' etc.? The Czech Republic has many species in these genera with a wide range of ecologies: which species did you use? If you are modeling genera, not species, you should say so and justify this, using the data you have for the individual species. Your methods appear to simply stack SDMs for single species assuming that there is no interaction between them. I think this is probably necessary and none of the alternative approaches work any better, but you should briefly point out the problem with assuming plant species do not compete and can all coexist in one spot. Stacked SDMs almost certainly overestimate local species richness. Finally, there are some fairly minor language problems. For example, what is 'species habitat' in the Abstract? The area? I am sure the authors can deal with these. 

Author Response

Reviewer #1

Thank you for your patience and time to review our paper. Below are short answers. You find detail in the revised manuscript

Q1. Future projection, which models,  why use  CMIP5 instead of CMIP 6. Why RCP 8.5?

Future projections are based on the downscaled  UK HadGEM ES2 model, which is the most accurate capturing of changes in precipitation patterns in the Czech Republic (lines 129 -131, 366-367).  Dynamic downscaling was done. Unfortunately, the downscale model data for a mild or moderate climate scenario was not available at the time of this study. In addition to being the only downscaled scenario, RCP 8.5  is commonly used for local studies among research groups in the Czech Republic. Because of these limitations, our result focuses more on the current than the future (lines 14-15 and  77)

Q2. What are the eight selected species, species or genera

The eight species included species and the subspecies where necessary. This is because of the cut-off AUC value we used to select and limit the number of modelled species. We also want to ensure enough observation for each species (lines 198 -204)

Q3. Acknowledge problem with stacked SDMs

We have the limitation of stacked SDM in the discussion, also highlighting the fact that there are possible uncertainties or errors with the calculated mean stable area index (MSAi) values (lines 453 -457, 464 – 468, 480 - 484)

Q4. Language  and typos

We have tried to improve English, tenses and sentences. In addition, we are in touch with a native English teacher to double-check errors

 

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an important topic, how much change in habitats and species has occurred recently and is projected to occur under a climate change scenario in the coming decades in this case, for the Czech Republic. Statistical methods for modeling current and future species ranges and workflow diagram look reasonable. I do have some suggestions for revisions listed below. 

It seems to me that agricultural land use and urban areas affect a lot of species distributions, and although you are taking this into account by analyzing places where species occur in your data (and many do not occur in these areas), you are also assuming that these areas of human use will not change between now and 2060 or 2100. This should be mentioned in methods or in the Discussion, since a lot of readers will wonder about this factor.

Methods--past tense should be used. there are a lot of present tense statements. 

Line 27. 'Poleward' or 'northward' would be a better word to us than 'towards temperate zones'.

Line 65, what are high species?  Do you mean tall species like trees, or vascular plants?

Lines 56-57 versus 83-84. MSAi range from 0-1 in one place versus 0-10 in the other place, be consistent throughout the manuscript.

Line 152, 500m2--does this mean 500 square meters (22 x 22 meters), or 500 x 500 meter squares (250,000 square meters)? I assume the latter, but your notation makes it look like the former. 

Line 246, where does 1119 come from? Should this be 1177?

Figure 2 needs more explanation.  Is it percent frequency among all of the 500 x 500 m grid cells in the country? Or among 10,000 sampled cells? Please clarify and remember that figure captions should make sense by themselves.

Figure 5 caption. Does this show the most important variable for each species/species group in the model?  Or does it show an example of one of the selected species that responds to each of the variables that were used in the model?

Line 386 should this be 20% ?

Author Response

Reviewer #2

we appreciate your time and patience to review our paper. Here short answer to the issues you raised. you will details in the revised manuscript. 

Q1. How about other drivers of change from land use, e.g. agriculture, infrastructure

These drivers have been acknowledged in the discussion, where we plan to apply for the GLOBIO modelling framework in a future study to assess the impact of these drivers (lines 450- 452). 

Q2. Methods:  use past tense

Tenses have been corrected accordingly, and we are in touch with an English to double-check our English

Q3. Unclear words/terminology e.g high species.

We are talking about higher vascular plant species. this correction has been made in the text

Q4. Inconsistency with scale, dimensions, numbers and units

We have double checked and corrected where necessary to ensure consistency

Q5. Unclear or poorly labelled tables and figures and tables.

Figures and tables have been updated. Figure 5, now as figure 5 and figure 6 shows the response of the top four variable variables to climate and environmental change

Q6. Result not clear enough. 

Other important changes in the manuscript have been highlighted in blue. We hope everything will become clearer as you go through the manuscript once again. 

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I am now happy with the changes and clarifications.