Trends in Dominican Republic Coral Reef Biodiversity 2015–2022

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review of diversity-2195549 “Trends in Dominican Republic coral reef biodiversity 2015 - 2022”

General comment:

Steneck & Torre explored the country-wide coral reef ecosystem status in order to establish biodiversity baselines against which trends can tracked. Steneck & Torre’s results have demonstrated coral cover and reef fishes have declined across the country. Finally, authors discuss about management improvements that could decrease the pressure on coral reefs.

 

The introduction, methodology, results and discussion are generally well presented. However, the manuscript needs minor changes before being accepted, and the multiple word spacing should be also checked. Details are listed below:

Introduction

Lines 34-35: please add reference or justify why “this is especially true in the Caribbean”

Lines 35-36: there are several studies demonstrating “where and why reef condition is declining”. Please clarify the sentence adding more information and/or reference supporting the statement.

Line 56: please replace DR with Dominican Republic (DR)

Line 64: please replace report with study

Materials and Methods

Lines 73-74: please indicate the depths for the survey transects

Results & Discussion

Lines 117-119: please add references or data supporting the statement

Lines 136-138: please add number of percentage

Line 155: please replace (Labridae: Scarinae) with (scarids) as mentioned in Fig 7

Lines 154-165 & 172-176 & 190-203: please add some numbers indicating abundance or decline

Lines 228-229: do you mean negative and positive “trends”? Please clarify and indicate in the sentence

Line 237: a closing bracket is missing

Line 244: please change and in non-italic

Line 248: please add your definition for “weedy” recruiting coral species

Conclusions

Line 273: please add (SCTL) or replace Stony Coral Rapid Tissue Loss with SCTL

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I really enjoyed reading this manuscript. It is valuable, interesting, and very well presented. I only have minor concerns about it.

1) I would like to see context in the Introduction for readers who are new to coral research. Specifically - please include general trends in the decline of fish and coral in the Caribbean in the past few decades, and on prior work from the Dominican Republic. 

2) The Methods could be improved with a brief "Study Site" section. Twelve sites in six regions is an impressive field survey. Why were the chosen regions selected? How representative are they of coral in the DR? Where are coral abundant? Where are they absent? Can you include rough information on how extensive north shore and south shore reefs are? 

Please also include dates of data collection - perhaps in the Supplemental Materials.  

3) I believe the manuscript would be improved by adding a discussion of uncertainty. It could follow the suggestions of Wasserstein Schirm and Lazar 2019 (Moving to a World Beyond p < 0.05, The American Statistician). The error bars should be described as standard deviation or standard error in a figure legend. 

Grammatical corrections:

Line 18:  There are two spaces between every sentence of the abstract, but only one space between them at line 18.

Line 108: Replace "ecosystem's" with "ecosystem"

Line 255: Too many spaces between "Lower figure shows" and "there"  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx