Predicting Dynamics of the Potential Breeding Habitat of Larus saundersi by MaxEnt Model under Changing Land-Use Conditions in Wetland Nature Reserve of Liaohe Estuary, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This study analyses the dynamics of the breeding habitat of Saunders’s Gulls using Landsat-derived Land Use maps and environmental variables integrated in a MaxEnt Model. It is an interesting study and the manuscript was well prepared. Overall, I think it is mostly ready for publication.
Just some minor comments:
- The title is quite long. It should be more condensed.
- Not sure about the source of DEM data and its quality
- Interpreting roads from Landsat would not be a good idea for small roads. Other source such as OSM would be more useful.
- Table 2 and 3 are exactly similar. Should remove Table 3.
Regards.
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
In this paper, the authors analyzed the changes of the breeding habitat from 1988 to 2017, and utilized RDA to explore the relationships among the changes of suitable habitat of Larus saundersi and the dynamics of land uses. This manuscript is well organized and the drawn conclusions are coherent with the obtained results. The authors suggested strict conservation of seepweed marsh and implementation of habitat management practices to better protect Saunders’ Gull’s breeding habitat.
Lines 12 – 13: To delete this sentence: “Species distribution modelling is a suitable tool.”
Line 19: It is “…models were evaluated using area under the curve”.
Line 34: The keywords should be alphabetically arranged. Please, delete the colour green from the semicolon.
Lines 61 – 67: Please, explain better your hypothesis and predictions.
Line 41: I think that you should add also these two recent references to support this your sentence: “The Pearson correlation coefficient 157 (r) was calculated in SPSS 22.0, and highly correlated environmental variables with |r| ≥ 158 0.8 were excluded”. I would like to suggest:
Di Pasquale, G., et al. (2020). Coastal pine-oak glacial refugia in the Mediterranean basin: A biogeographic approach based on charcoal analysis and spatial modelling. Forests, 11(6), 673.
Du, Z., et al. (2021). Potential geographical distribution and habitat shift of the genus Ammopiptanthus in China under current and future climate change based on the MaxEnt model. Journal of Arid Environments, 184, 104328.
Line 164: It is Species Distribution Models.
Line 198: I think that you should add also these two recent references to support this your sentence: “…showing exceptionally excellent performance”. I would like to suggest:
Zhang, Y., et al. (2021). Global potential distribution prediction of Xanthium italicum based on Maxent model. Scientific reports, 11(1), 1-10.
Line 233: Please, use an white background in your figure 2 not grey.
Line 251: Please, move this figure in the supplementary materials.
Line 300: Please, move this table in the supplementary materials.
Line 302: Please, move this figure in the supplementary materials.
Line 375: Please, move this figure in the supplementary materials.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript is well written, and I have suggested few minor changes in terminology and language change. The methodology is standard, and authors have followed a standard approach in selecting environmental variables and autocollimation among variables.
My main comments in methods section are where the authors subjectively classified the model projections into few categories such as suitable, less suitable etc. While this might be acceptable, the authors need to justify it and acknowledge the available studies who have used MaxEnt outputs to define a threshold which can be used as the cut-off point for a location to be considered suitable or unsuitable. Please refer to the “pdf” file for my further comments.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
Well done
Author Response
well done
Reviewer 3 Report
Please look at few comments in the attached pdf file on two things:
Acknowledge that you are aware of the other studies on threshold-based classifications.
Authors: The cross-validation is not relevant to sample size, in our model run, we randomly chose 56 records for the training set and the remaining 7 for the testing set, and this process was repeated 10 times (line 211 in the revised manuscripts).
Note: I disagree, Cross-validation is relevant to sample size. It's quite simple and well-established subject. When you have a relatively smaller sample size (63) and doing a cross validation with 10-fold and your model has been tested by only seven points, how good you think this model might be compared to a model with 500 points and 10-fold CV which means model is tested with 5o points? When I have less that 500 points I do not recommend using CV, the number of replications do not necessarily improve the model nor compensate for it.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
