Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

On page 2, line 89 - I believe that Acetic Acid Fixation should be l.c as the previously stated glacial acetic acid is.

Line 169 - should the first and be deleted?

Author Response

p.2 l. 89; the reviewer is comparing the formatting of name of the fixative (capitalized in both cases) with the chemical components listed for first fixative (not capitalized in both cases). The reviewer made a minor error.  No inconsistencies to fix.

l.169;  the reviewers is correct at there is an extra "and" which has been deleted in the revised manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewer Report

 Overview

In the manuscript entitled “Cytogeography of Solidago sect. Erectae, sect. Villosicarpae, sect. Squarrosae, and sect. Brintonia (Asteraceae: Astereae)” the authors Semple & Cook present results of their work on taxa included in different sections of genus Solidago. This manuscript is a part of a long-term research done by the authors during years and dealing with different members of the tribe Astereae. Particularly, the submitted manuscript is a sound study on the cytogeography of species included in four sections of Solidago – Erectae, Squarrosae, Villosicarpae, and Brintonia. Information from a large sample of herbarium, literature data and new laboratory work was analyzed and cytogeography maps were created.

In general, the research is well-organized, methods are cleverly chosen and executed. The amount of collected data is important. Figures in the manuscript are numbered consecutively.

However, the text requires and should be reviewed by the authors. Comments and suggestions relating to the submitted manuscript have been made by the Reviewer in the PDF-file; please, see them.

Some additional comments and/or suggestions to the authors are given below:

 

Major:

1. Author(s) names for any taxon are expected to be cited where the species or taxon appears for the first time in the text. In order to avoid any error, confusion or discrepancy, most (if not all) taxonomical journals generally strictly follow IPNI for the author abbreviations. At many places of the PDF I inserted comments with the necessary corrections (e.g., the correct "Fernald" instead of "Fern."; or the right initials, etc.). Check carefully the correct authorities (better following IPNI).
2. Abstract: Some translocations of the sentences are needed. The first and the last sentences are connected. Please, make rearrangements.
3. Introduction: The aim of the study is not explicitly formulated! Please, express it more clearly.
4. Materials and Methods:

-          In my opinion, you should describe first the materials they have been used in the study and then describe the methods applied (in details);

-          The materials collected in the field and used later for the chromosome counts (by the authors) should also be mentioned, not only the vouchers of the previously published counts.

5. Results:

-          Page 3, lines 107-109: "Chromosome numbers are reported for the first time in Appendix 2 for 67 individuals from 65 locations in eastern Canada and the eastern United States for 13 species of Solidago sect. Erectae, S. sect. Squarrosae, and S. sect. Villosicarpae." – I definitely cannot agree with the statement that ALL chromosome numbers for 67 individuals included in Appendix 2 are reported "for the first time"! Some of the counts simply confirm previously published reports for the same chromosome number from accessions in the same or other provinces or states. Compare for example Appendix 1 and Appendix 2 – there are both published numbers in Appendix 1 for S. hispida var. hispida from Ontario AND unpublished (until now) numbers in Appendix 2 for the same taxon and same province. Other examples also exist. Revision / rephrasing is needed;

-          Page 3, lines 109-115: "The following are either first documented reports for the taxon or for the taxon for particular provinces and states: Solidago bicolor, …" – As concerns the "first documented reports", I recommend to precise exactly which taxa have been studied for the first time and their numbers are new to science (e.g., is S. sciaphila such a species?) and which are new reports to the regions/states/provinces. State this explicitly in the text. If you make some changes in this section of the manuscript, pay attention and make the necessary changes in the Abstract as well (if needed).

6. Appendix 2: As not all the records in Appendix 2 are reported for the first time, it is very important to stress on those chromosome numbers that are new for the Science/for the species or they are first reports for particular state or province. You can use different symbols, but you must not forget to include these symbols and the respective explanations in the Appendix heading.
7. References: Some of the references (and especially the titles) were not cited correctly. I made many corrections, however you should check everything and make the necessary corrections.

 

Minor:

8. Although there are no strict requirements of the journal Taxonomy for the manuscript preparation (these are free format submissions), the authors must prepare their manuscript thoroughly and to be as consistent as possible. There are discrepancies in the text of the submitted manuscript, e.g. the way of citations of the references (in the main text as well as in the References section). For example, one can see "Semple and Beck 2021 [1]" and also "Semple and Beck [1]"; in addition, in the Appendices the references are given only by their number in square brackets.

Of course, there are two ways of citing the references – by citing only the reference citation number in square brackets (e.g., [29]), which is the simplest way; OR citing the author(s), year of publication and reference number in square brackets (e.g., Semple et al. 1993 [29]). Whatever is your choice, you have to be consistent. So, please, equalize the references cited in the text.

9. Materials and Methods:

-          The "examined" vouchers are in MT and WAT. What about the "borrowed" vouchers? In my opinion, herbaria (by their acronyms) should be stated!

-          Think about the possibility to include a text in this section explaining how the cytogeographic maps were prepared (…based on all counts; range based on all collections seen and literature data). And then delete this part of the figure captions in all 9 figures.

10. Results: I definitely think that it would be very good if you have photographed and can provide an illustration or illustrations of the newly reported chromosome numbers, especially the number of S. sciaphila if this is the first record for this species!
11. I would like to know if there are some differences (morphological or others) between the diploid and tetraploid cytodemes in S. speciosa? Or they differ only in ploidy level?
12. Appendix 1:

-           You have to choose the way in which herbarium acronyms and literature sources are cited and to apply it equally everywhere. For example, in the Appendix 1 there exist both "(WAT [17])" and "(WAT; [17])". However, it should be (WAT; Peirson et al. 2012 [17]);

-          Both "to sp." (see for example page 12: S. speciosa) and "to species" (page 13: S. hispida) can be found in the Appendix 1. Sometimes they are mixed. You have to choose one of them and apply it equally everywhere. Or another exit is possible – e.g., all "to sp." in Solidago hispida var. hispida could be omitted and the phrase "(all published as S. hispida unless otherwise cited)" could be inserted after the taxon name in Appendix 1.

13. Appendix 1 and Appendix 2:

-          The chromosome numbers should be cited exactly in the same way everywhere! In the present version they are cited differently: "2n = 18." and "2n = 18" (without a dot); "2n=9_II." and "2n = 9_II." (with or without blank spaces); "2n" (not italicized) and "2n"; etc.]. Equalize, please!

-          In my opinion, you could delete all the authorities for all taxa names in the Appendices (1 and 2), as they are cited at first occurrence in the text.

14. References: The references may be in any style, provided that a consistent formatting is used throughout. Please, make thorough checks and correct where necessary. There are MDPI requirements for the references (Reference list and citation style guide at: https://mdpi-res.com/data/mdpi_references_guide_v5.pdf), please, follow them strictly.

-          References 3 and 19 are cited very differently, although they both concern treatments in Flora of North America;

-          DOI numbers are not mandatory but highly encouraged. So, you can provide them if possible and where available.

-          Issues/numbers of the journals can be added where available. They help finding articles easier.

 

Please, see my other notes, suggestions and comments in the PDF file as well.

I realize that some of the problems that I have noticed may be created as a result of moving the text to the journal template. However, I had to paid attention to them.

 

Decision: This manuscript needs a revision before publishing.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Comments on Reviewer 2 suggestions:

The reviewer pointed out multiple inconsistencies in formatting in the text and appendices.  All of these were corrected in the revised manuscript., e.g.  “2n=18” versus “2n = 18” in the appendices, “to species” versus “to sp.” in the appendices.

All scientific names were checked to confirm that they follow IPNI.

Major:

The order of sentences in the abstract follows the abstracts of my other published papers on cytogeography in which I list note new first reports last.  The reviewer suggestion to place this sentence earlier does not improve the abstract in my opinion.  Thus, I did not follow this suggestion which is hardly a major one.

In the materials and methods, it is clearly stated that meiotic counts were made from samples collected and fixed in the field and that mitotic counts were made from either transplanted rootstocks or from seeds collected in the field and grown in the greenhouse.  The herbaria in which vouchers of previously published counts are all listed in Appendix 1 and do not need to be cited in the materials and methods.  Were the problem that such information was not given in the manuscript would be a major omission.  That such information was not included as the reviewer would do if he/she was writing the paper is not a major problem, but a matter of preference.

I agree with the reviewer that my original phrasing of the which counts are true first reports for a taxon and which were merely preciously unreported counts for a taxa needed some clarification.  Changes were made to the text to fix this problem.  All taxa in each section or subsection, etc. were included in Appendix 1 so that it would be clear that there no chromosome counts for some taxa had never been reported before.  The discussion also notes for which taxa there still remain no chromosome count data.  Thus, I make it clear in the manuscript what are true first reports (those for S. sciaphila) and which reports are merely additional counts that come from states/provinces not previously sampled (some of the counts for all other taxa).

I was trained as a traditional cytotaxonomist 5 decades ago.  Cytogeography (biogeography of chromosome counts) is the purpose of this manuscript and historically working out the and producing such maps has been understood as the purpose of reporting this kind of research.  I do not understand the reviewers request to make the purpose of this manuscript more clear.  “Cytogeography” in the title is sufficient to make clear the purpose of the manuscript. Doing such work well requires a large number of chromosome counts, which can take multiple decades to accumulate. I made my labs first counts for taxa in the mid 1970s and the last ones in 2012-2013.  It’s not like the project was rushed into print.  The reviewer is being hyper critical.

Minor:

I acknowledge that there are inconsistencies in how references are noted in the text and in the Appendicies.  I prefer the more traditional method of citing text by author(s) last name(s) with the year of publication, but the journal Taxonomy uses the space saving method of [#] with the number in the references being assigned by the order in which references are noted in the text.  I sometimes repeat the author/date method in various places in the text because I think it helps the reader know which taxonomic treatment is being discussed without having to jump down to the list of references.  In Appendix 1 listing previously published reports, space saving methods take precedence because there are a large number of previously published counts and just noting references by [#] saves a great deal of space.  Also, it is not critical to emphasize who published previous reports since it is noted in text that the Beaudry lab was the first to publish chromosome counts for many taxa in Solidago.

DOI numbers are a recent “invention” and I do not have them for the vast majority of the publications on Solidago published before such numbers started being used.  As noted by the reviewer, these are not mandatory.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper describes geographical distribution of chromosomal complements in three Solidago Sections and by means of conventional cytology analysis of somatic and meiotic chromosome counts. I have read carefully the manuscript and I found that the results are very interesting and the research has been finely performed. Besides, large size of samples makes the study robust enough.

However, the discussion section could be improved including:

- Cytogeography of Solidago species could include a brief explanation about variable distribution area of some species (for instance, S. porteri).

- I suggest to the author to add the diploid proportion in other Solidago taxonomic rank from the literature in case it is possible for a comparative purpose.

 I also suggest to the author the incorporation of a figure illustrating chromosome complements (somatic and/or meiotic chromosomes) of diploid and polyploidy species that would improve the manuscript quality.

Minor corrections:

1) It is better if the chromosome number in polyploidy species were described as 2n=4X= 36 or 2n= 6X=54 along the text and also including the two appendix. Besides, in line 154 I suggest to include the chromosome number in the figure descriptions.

2) In the taxa on the chromosome complements were analysed in meiotic stages, the expression 2n= 9 II could be described. I don’t know if the Taxonomy readers are familiarized with this specific nomenclature.

 3) L. 173: lack the authority of some species. 

Author Response

Comments on Reviewer 3 suggestions:

I have added a paragraph commenting on variation in range size and population frequency in general in Solidago and cite examples of the extremes.  I also cite the original work on S. villosicarpa because it included details on distribution of a very rare diploid.   The Flora North America treatment of Solidago (Semple and Cook 2006) is cited as a source for habitat features of each species included in this cytogeography paper.  No need to repeat the details in this paper.

The reviewer suggested adding more on proportion of diploids in other Solidago infrageneric groups, which cannot be done until I have published additional cytogeography studies that include critical data.  We do cite Semple (2016) which presented a summary of all known chromosome numbers for all taxa in the genus as defined at that time.  Thus, there is no need to do it again in this manuscript.

The reviewer suggested including photomicrographs of chromosome squashes, but I none available for the taxa included in this manuscript.  I also have no way to obtain such pictures:  no live plants, no microscope any more.   I have added citations of several papers by Jean Beaudry and his students who did publish camera lucida images of squashes.  I concluded long ago that there was little difference in chromosome size across ploidy levels and that any chromosome rearrangements were not obvious in the numerous squashes I have looked at in multiple species in the genus.  Every species in the genus has the same base number and there are no obvious distinctive differences in karyotypes in different groups of goldenrods.

 

Under Minor corrections the reviewer had three suggestions.

1. Indicate ploidy level every time 2n=18, etc. is used in text; i.e. 2n=2x=18, 2n=4x=36, etc. This is not the standard way counts are listed and our existing text indicates which species include 2x, 4x and 6x samples.  Thus, I would prefer not to follow the reviewer’s suggestion.
2. The review suggests that the expression “2n=9_II“ be explained. This is standard way meiotic chromosome counts are reported and has been for the past 3-4 decades.
3. The review cites a case where there is no authority for the species name, but it was given earlier in the paper and not repeated subsequently, which is standard practice in taxonomic literature now. I have checked to make sure that authorities are included for each time a taxon name is included the first time.