Spatial Distribution, Diversity Mapping, and Gap Analysis of Wild Vigna Species Conserved in India’s National Genebank

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I believe that the issues described in this work are extremely important, the methods used are correct. The presented material is sufficient, properly developed. The list of publications is appropriate. In my opinion, the work can be accepted for publication.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Revision of the manuscript “Spatial Distribution, Diversity Mapping and Gap Analysis of

Wild Vigna Species Conserved in India’s National Genebank” authors: Thendral US, DP Semwal, Veena Gupta, S Archak, Ramakrishnan M Nair and Kuldeep Tripathi

 The authors of this manuscript carried out explorations for germplasm collection of all wild species of Vigna growing in India because they considered the genus to be important for conservation planning of wild relatives of crops. Because of this, I found the subject matter of this manuscript to be interesting also in consideration of the global warming.

 

The most important aspect of my suggestions is that the list of species that runs at the bottom of the document and that is included in either the table or the figures be presented in alphabetical order.

When a species is mentioned for the very first time in the book, the patronymic name must be included for each and every taxon. If this is not the case, the authors should include a table that contains an exhaustive list of the taxa that are discussed in the work.

In addition, I recommend including the references describing the flora of India.

 Minor revision are reported along the manuscript

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

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Reviewer 3 Report

I think this is a decent presentation of an important topic and it should be published.  I also think the writing style and the figures are of good quality and the literature cited is adequate pending some comments (below).  I would like the authors to think of a few more  issues, and to briefly address each of them in the intro, methods and/or discussion sections with just a sentence or two.

1.  Why use the Shannon-Weaver index?  Richness (species count) alone suffices to present the point that southwestern India has the greatest diversity of Vigna species.  Alternately, the authors could use other richness indices - with or separate from evenness indices - if they wish, but Shannon-Weaver conflates both. See Magurran, Ecological Diversity and its Measurement.

2.  I like their application of the BioClim modeling done here, But please be sure to point out the many sources of potential future climate variation about which we are currently uncertain.  Also, given the current high diversity of Vigna in SW India, and the future prediction of good habitat in the NW part of the peninsular India, with less likely habitat in between, any future range changes would be very challenging for these plants.  In any case, I like the approach but make sure you highlight the uncertainties here.

3.  Given the various border conflicts between India and China and India and Pakistan, as well as civil skirmishes in the NE Hill States, I am not surprised that many fewer collections were made from those places.  My guess is there are more species to be found in those areas and many of them are under-surveyed.  I think the authors should also make a point of this.  While I do not think this is the case, one could conclude that a history of less field work due to political concerns may explain the richness and species presence/absence phenomena in those places.  At least bring the topic up briefly in the Intro, Methods and the Discussion.

4.  Given that these are potentially important food plants and some species are cultivated, I think the authors should give some insight concerning other potential venues of conservation, particularly with regard to small scale farms and home gardens.  See Kuniyal et al. 2019.  Journal of Threatened Taxa, for example, about the importance of home gardens for the persistence of Costus, an important Himalayan medicinal plant that is, as far as we know, extinct in the wild.

Those are my thoughts.  I suggest the authors adda sentence or two on each of these topic and consider the diversity indices.  This would require a minor revision as it is mostly adding a few more refs and some description.  There is no need to keep me anonymous from these authors.

 

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