Biogeographic Patterns and Richness of the Meconopsis Species and Their Influence Factors across the Pan-Himalaya and Adjacent Regions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I have reviewed your manuscript “Biogeographic patterns and richness of the Meconopsis species and their influence factors across the Pan-Himalaya and adjacent regions” for possible publication in Diversity. I found it interesting. However, I have some questions about species data and research methods. Does Meconopsis(1445) represent other species of genus Meconopsis ? Which species are included in Meconopsis (1445)? Are the ecological niches of these species equivalent? If not, then it can't be combined to make a ecological niche model. I think the richness calculation is unreasonable. I suggest predicting the potential distribution of each species and then stacking to get the richness.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are very grateful to your kind and constructive comments and suggestions in terms of our manuscript. We have tried our best to revise the relevant part in manuscript. All of your questions were answered one-by-one carefully.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This study focused in the effect of enviroment and landscape characteristics in the current distribution and species richness of Meconopsis species in the Pan-Himalaya and adjacent regions. The manuscript is very interesting, and the analyses and approaches used are the correct to answer the questions set out in the objectives (but see first comment); I cannot make any comment to improve the main text and I think that the length of the different sections is appropiate. With respect to the figures, in my opinion figure 5 and 6 should be modified to increase the size of the map because it’s very difficult to appreciate them correctly.

However, I have two important questions about the work:

1. It should be indicated (in supplementary files or in an appendix) the number of presence locations of each species and not only for the four species with more data. About this, I’m not sure if a different approach could be more informative to answer the question of the potential distribution of the genus, or at least, it could be made to compare with the current results. This approach should be to analyse each species independently and to make up the map for the genus with all the maps for the different species. Currently, the four species indicated in the study represent more than 40% of the location data, and so, it’s possible the result for the genus is biased by the characteristics of these species (whereas the characteristics of the species less represented are underrated).

2. I missed a comparison or a correlation between the potential distribution of the genus obteined and the species richness. I think it would be very interesting to confirm the robustness of the results of the SDM.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We appreciate your kind suggestions and we have revised the manuscript accordingly. In addition, the responses to the comments are given below.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx