Factors of Detection Deficits in Vascular Plant Inventories—An Island Case Study
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors update the plant checklist of the Mediterranean island of Limnos (North Aegean, Greece), with a total of 231 newly reported taxa. Instead of publishing a classic checklist of the newly added taxa, the authors investigate the potential causes that would have made them to be missed in prior inventories, and I find it quite original.
The paper is very well written, with clear objectives stated in the introduction and clear methods. The results are also very well presented. Unless I missed them, I found no typographical errors. Overall, I have no objection for the paper to be published as it is in Diversity.
Few suggestions:
- The number of newly added taxa is mentioned for the first time in line 90. Although the checklist was not the focus of the manuscript, it might be good to state in the abstract the number of taxa in the flora of the island as well as the number of newly added taxa.
- The term “aquatics” is not on of Raunkier’s life-forms. The authors might use “hydrophytes” and “Rheophytes” for this category.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to thank you for the review and the suggestions that we followed one by one.
Kind regards
Maria Panitsa
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript by Ristow et al focus on an interesting item in Mediterranean biodiversity, i.e. the relevance of sound approaches on plant diversity, as a basis for further developments. In spite of the biogeographic interest of Mediterranean islands, the knowledge of their flora is somewhere poor, and generally uneven. On the case study of Limnos, the authors show the shortcomings found in earlier inventories, and draw main causes of uneven knowledge.
The data upon which the paper is presented seem to be relevant enough to reach the objectives announced; the results are correctly elaborated and presented; and the discussion comes correctly from these results. Moreover, the manuscript is well written and presented (including figures).
General issue
- One of the announced (or implicit) focus outlined in the Introduction (i.e., phantom species & hidden diversity) is (apparently) barely treated through the manuscript (e.g., lines 96-97). It should be appropriate, for instant, to comment on the taxonomic groups overlooked following old, coarse taxonomic schemes, which now may be more easily treated. This could merit at least one comment in the discussion section.
- According to the previous comment, a bit more detail could be given concerning the taxonomic soundness or sources (monographies, herbaria) used in the identification of complex groups.
Small formal comments
There are a few comments along the manuscript, to be considered by the authors, and eventually leading to re-writing.
Fig. S1
In the histograms, the Y axes should include values (percentages). In the same figure the caption should include the meaning of the abbreviations (vs, s, ….)
Fig. S3
The caption should be a bit more explicit: it would be preferable to mention in full the index bsor (i.e., Sorensen index), and that such index is calculated between old and new records.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to thank you for the review and the suggestions that we followed one by one.
Kind regards
Maria Panitsa
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
