Fruticose Lichen Communities at the Edge: Distribution and Diversity in a Desert Sky Island on the Colorado Plateau

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study is very important due to the lacking in the study of lichen in the desert. This article can be published but there are some room for improvements as follow:

1) in the introduction section, the authors need to highlight the significant of the study? also, please highlights the issue of the lack of study of the fruticose lichen in the desert area.

2) in the methodological section, especially in the molecular method, please insert citations and references.

3) Please make a conclusion section. It well help readers to have a better understandings of the contribution, novelty, recommendation and also the limitation of this study.

 

Thank you

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents an excellent field work regarding the distribution of fruticose lichen communities. But the authors failed to present this topic in its general context, and they adopted a regional approach regarding the state of art and the distribution of lichen communities, and its ecological importance. In addition, section Conclusions needs to be added to manuscript to summarize the finding, and to present the conclusions of this paper.  

 

 

 Introduction

·         No quantitative results are presented in the abstract

·         Line 65 and 72: Figures 1 and 2 need to be removed from the introduction and presented in other section (Materials and methods or Results).

·         The map presented in figure 1 could be better, because it is not clear if this map distribution is produced by the authors or from the literature or both.? Could the author put the studied sites in this map?

·         Add scale in Figure 2 and 3

Materials and Methods

 

·         how was Google Earth Pro was used to identify sites?

·         Specify the device used to get the Coordinates

·         Lines 128 – 141: put the references

·         Lines 156 – 161: put the references

Results

·         Lines 221 – 227: the details presented need to be presented in the section Materials and Methods

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors improved their manuscript significantly.

All comments and corrections were considered.

 The manuscript is ready for publication.