Terrestrial Tardigrada (Water Bears) of the Słowiński National Park (Northern Poland)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

You submitted an interesting faunistic study to the journal Diversity. I only have a few notes/suggestions on it:

1. In the cells of both tables, the data is centered both vertically and horizontally. I have to state that the tables arranged in this way were not easy for me to read and I am convinced that they would be better readable if the data in each cell of these tables were aligned to the upper left.

2. In the text and in Table 2, 27 identified taxa are listed, but in both Wenn diagrams there are a total of 28 taxa. This disproportion needs to be resolved - there is probably an error somewhere in the Wenn diagrams. Please check the data in these diagrams.

3. Data on the number of individuals and eggs in lines 98-99 may be incorrect. The results of my counts in Table 2 are 786 individuals and 44 eggs. Please check these data.

4. I entered the other notes directly into the manuscript.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I have read and revised the manuscript entitled “Terrestrial Tardigrada (water bears) of the Słowiński National Park (Northern Poland)” done by Bartylak and co-authors. It is an interesting piece of work and shows the results of the sampling in a Polanda National Park. Despite that it is very important to know better the richness and diversity of tardigrades in any place, I would like to point out some concerns about this study

In the last decades the Tardigrada taxonomy increased the support value of the species descriptions due to the combination of the integrative morphology and molecular analysis (specially DNA barcoding). In the present study, it is possible to observe that all the identification were done without the combination of morphological and molecular data, even without DNA sequencing. Furthermore, there are no photos of specimens found, at least, for the new reports from Poland. I think that it is important to show to the other researchers the features that were used to identify those species, as any molecular data was shown. I would like to know more about these identifications and have more clues about them. Finally, I am not sure if identified a species (e.g. Hypsibius convergens, Diphascon pingue), that belongs to a species complex with

a widespread distribution and not redescribed using integrative methodos, without the use of “cf.” or “aff.” (Species affinis) is a good initiative in order to better understand the distribution pattern of those species. 

It may be a preliminary version of the article, but the figures are of low quality. It is important to increase the dpi value to have a better quality (figures 2 to 4). Another thing, the authors must redraw the figures 2 and 3. The axis of arrangement of the 3 curves must be vertical and not horizontal, so it will not be necessary to repeat the captions 3 times. As the authors ran several analyzes in R, it would be advisable to use the ggpubr package to create the article's plates (figures 2 and 3).

Another issue that I would like to have more information about is the effect of sampling bias in the results obtained here. For example, among the 57 sampling sites, only 3 were cryptogams against 14 lichen and 40 mosses. If we compared with the exclusive species in each of these environment, we have, respectively, 1, 3 and 10

Minor consideration: Programming/data analysis was carried out in R and not in Rstudio (the latter is just a more user-friendly visualization platform).

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

General comments

The study entitled “Terrestrial Tardigrada (water bears) of the Slowinski National Park (Northern Poland)” provides new information about shows distributions of tardigrade in Poland in the limited area. Confirming of some rare species, one of the main topics of this study, is greatly finds which has to be published for future scientists. The analyses for rarefaction and extrapolation are also interested.

However, the description of the materials & methods and results on the manuscrtipt are not enough to confirm the scientific correctness, so I would like to claim to add more details of the study on the manuscript.

It is not recommended to describe and discuss the species of samples without confirming DNA sequences of available markers.

At least, comparisons of DNA sequences within species which sequences are publicly available should be done (e.g. Mil. tardigradum, dornensis, Hyp. dujardini, and so on) to make the description more correctly. Or, if you cannot, add “cf.”.

Line 66

Is “ca. 21-21C” correctly described?

Figure 1.

Please put another figure showing the wider area to easily understand for non-Polska and non-Europe people. In addition, please link the “sample number” of Table 1 and the red points of Figure 1, if possible.

Materials and Methods

The authors should describe more details of the methods.

At least, the methods should include:

1.     The medium for mount the sample.

2.     How many slides of respective species you checked.

3.     How to identify the species (more details)

Table 2 should be fixed to understand easily (maybe it should be claimed for the editorial office).

 Citation [2]

Describe the edition of the checklist.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for your revision.

I found a few minor comments on the revised version.

Please reconsider to revise or not.

Nice work!!

Best regards,

<minor comments>

Results: Blue highlighted sentences (newly added sentences) includes "Fig." as the abbreviation of Figure, but it is not abbreviated in other part of the manuscript. Please unfiy it.

Discussion: The abbreviations of names of the genera (e.g. Hys., Mil., and Mac.) appeared a few times on the manuscript. Providing full-name is more clear, I think.