Putting the “Beaver” Back in Beverley Brook: Rapid Shifts in Community Composition following the Restoration of a Degraded Urban River

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, 

many thanks for this research; I recommend acceptance.  Your results provide strong evidences on the effects of specific restoration methods on invertebrates and fish communities. It is also a good example on the need to mitigate or eliminate sources of human-caused (large-scale) degradation as the first step towards restoring ecosystems.

 

Author Response

no comments made by reviewer

Reviewer 2 Report

Manuscript “Putting the “Beaver” back in Beverly Brook: rapid shifts in community composition following the restoration of a degraded urban river” by Daniel M. Perkins, Toby Hull, Niamh Bubb, Alex Cunningham, Rory Glackin, Thomas Glenn and Stacey Smith and Bella Davies

The authors monitored invertebrate and fish communities before and after the restoration of a small urban river in London. Their main results showed that the restoration works caused a general increase in invertebrate density and an increase in their evenness; for fish there was an increase in biomass richness and average body mass. They observed changes in the density of already existing taxa rather than the development of new assemblages, suggesting that other factors could be important for evaluating the changes following river restoration.

The work is well structured but some parts of the methodology and result presentation are not completely clear, and therefore some clarifications would be needed. One of the main comments is about the reaches selection. At lines 132-133 you state that the selected reaches were 5 (two subject to restoration and 3 not subject to restoration), but those actually analyzed were always 4, chosen randomly (two subject to restoration and 2 not subject to restoration), please explain the reason of your choice (see also at lines 142-143; 173-174; 184-185).  Another minor note concerns the use of “riverflies”. This term is usually referred to three insect groups (mayflies, caddisflies and stoneflies), starting from line 18, but its use here it is very confusing. Sometimes it seems to include also insect families from other orders (i.e. Simuliidae) and also non-insect taxa (i.e. Amphipoda).

Considering replacing the terminology "control" with something like “not restored” or “unrestored”. “Control” can be misleading.

Minor comments are reported below.

- The order in which the zoological groups are reported (in the tables and graphs) is very confusing, it would be advisable to follow an order (alphabetical or taxonomic).

- Clarify for Trichoptera if and when you refer to total Trichoptera, when to cased or caseless Trichoptera, there is confusion.

- line 15: check the spelling “Berveley” or “Beverly” (see also at line 90 and 125).

- line 57: “before-after-control-impact”, indicate here the acronym BACI.

- lines 63-65: this sentence needs more bibliographic references concerning case studies on European rivers, e.g. some experience from France, Italy, Spain, that can give to the readers a more complete framework on this issue. See below for some suggestions.

- Arenas-Sánchez A, Dolédec S, Vighi M, Rico A. Effects of anthropogenic pollution and hydrological variation on macroinvertebrates in Mediterranean rivers: A case-study in the upper Tagus river basin (Spain). Sci Total Environ. 2021. 766:144044.

- Mondy CP, Villeneuve B, Archaimbault V, Usseglio-Polatera P. 2012. A new macroinvertebrate-based multimetric index (I2M2) to evaluate ecological quality of French wadeable streams fulfilling the WFD demands: a taxonomical and trait approach. Ecol Indic. 18:452–467.

- Pallottini M., Goretti E., Selvaggi R., Cappelletti D., Dedieu N., Cereghino R. (2017). An efficient semi-quantitative macroinvertebrate multimetric index for the assessment of water and sediment contamination in streams. Inland waters, 7:314-322.

- lines 84-85: “poor water quality and lack of a colonist pool in the region” are very specific aspects to be included as hypotheses to be tested, I would leave them as explanations in the discussion.

- line 97: clarify the exact period in which the restoration work was carried out. It appears to have started after the beginning of October 2015, but it is not clear when it ended.

- line 140: clarify what is meant with “miscellaneous”, is it all the taxa added together or just the remaining taxa? If it is the second case, it should be better to specify (also in the supplementary materials) which were the other taxa present.

- lines 159-60 and 168: bibliographic references are required for the BMWP and ASPT indices.

- line 250: add “Fish”

- line 308: replace “casedless” with “caseless”.

- line 309: put “Hydropsyche” in italic.

- lines 394-396: I think that this statement is superfluous, considering that is a personal observation.

- Figure 4: delete “Guides”

- Figure 5: specify that the figure is for fish only; insert the correct legend with the colours, as in the supplementary figures S3, 4 and 5! In this way the figure is not understandable. Delete “Treatment” under the x-axis of Fig. 5a.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Putting the “Beaver” back in Beverly Brook by Perkins et al. was a very good read of a well-designed study.  I think the authors did a nice job summarizing the data with non-independence statistical approaches to answer their key objectives.  This paper should be well-accepted by the Water readership and the ecological restoration community since it is not very often that stream restoration yields positively measured biological uplift as was found here.  I would like to see more emphasis in Results and Discussion on the condition assessment trends (ASPT, BMWP) as this is often a driving regulatory factor in funding restoration projects.

Line 48: use comma after e.g. and i.e. throughout text. Also change “(re) adding”, to “reestablishing”

Line 100-101 and throughout: add a space between value and m (e.g., 600 m)

Line 141:  Move this whole paragraph up before the density.  Since July comes before October, it just makes better chronological sense in the Methods.  Also, does the Environmental Agency protocol require July sampling?  I am confused why you chose Oct for density and July for diversity.  Please clarify.

Line 184.  Why didn’t you measure habitat across all years?  What was the purpose of measuring habitat 15 times per reach?  Does the PCA represent each replicate or the means of the 15 repeats?  Please clarify here (and in the PCA method section 2.10).

Table 1.  replace “to” with a hyphen or en dash

Line 283: Principal misspelled

Line 286:  how was this significant effect r2 obtained?

Figure 2.  “Principal”.  Also, what do the point refer to?  Is this part of the 15 observations per reach?  Please explain in the caption and corresponding Section 2.10.

Line 293:  Consistently “found”

Line 295: showed

Line 309: italicize Hydropsyche

Figure 4.  no shaded areas depicted for confidence bounds (same with Fig S7)

Figure 5.  The legend does not show color patterns for the taxa.

Line 374:  restoration “had”

Line 449:  this is the first time you mention any water quality exceedances.  Should cite where these phospate and ammonia data come from since you do not include these data.

 

Author Response

see attached

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Manuscript “Putting the “Beaver” back in Beverley Brook: rapid shifts in community composition following the restoration of a degraded urban river” by Daniel M. Perkins, Toby Hull, Niamh Bubb, Alex Cunningham, Rory Glackin, Thomas Glen and Stacey Smith and Bella Davies

 

The authors of the manuscript answered in a precise manner to almost all the reviewers’ suggestions; even in the cases where the requests made by the reviewer could not be accepted, the authors' responses were exhaustive. The manuscript is now improved in clarity, the data analysis methods and presentations are clearer.

However, I noticed that some of the changes requested on the references were not made, even if in the authors’ response they affirmed that the changes were accepted. In particular, I believe it is important that a complete European framework on the topic is reported, which is why I suggested those papers.

In addition, none of the changes in the reference section were visible (not highlighted).

However, I am convinced that once these additions are made, the manuscript could be suitable for publication in the journal.

Author Response

We thank Reviewer 2 for spotting this error. Only one of the three references they suggested was included in the submitted manuscript for some unknown reason..

This has now been rectified and the references (no 22-24) are now highlighted in the bibliography and the text.