Bioclimatic Envelopes for Two Bat Species from a Tropical Island: Insights on Current and Future Distribution from Ecological Niche Modeling

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors present an interesting manuscript on the habitat suitability modeling for two species of bats in Sri Lanka. I found the paper well written and relatively clear, yet I have a few comments that should be taken into consideration before publication. Importantly, the manuscript is hard to read in several parts (results and discussion) because of excessive length.

 

Abstract

• Careful when stating that bats regulate insect populations, since this has never been quantitatively demonstrated
• “are” paramount
• Not clear what “their” refers to, please rephrase the sentence from “Thus” to “challenging”
• Line19-20: this is not true as a general rule, I would specify this mostly applies to (some) tropical species, very poorly known
• Line 26: reduction ins response to what?
• Line 29: strategies like what? Provide 1-2 examples

 

Introduction

• Lines 81-93: this paragraph on maxent should be moved into methods

 

M&M

• It is not clear whether picta occurrences were selected only from Sri Lanka or from the entire species’ range. While I understand the rationale in case of the first choice, this may strongly bias results and consideration obtained from sdms. I encourage the authors to disclose this aspect and justify their choice.
• Table 1 can be moves as supplementary material

Results

• In their current form, results are quite repetitive. I suggest to reshape this entire section and try to make it shorter and more concise. Maybe the use of tables may easily support this.

Discussion

• The discussion is definitely too long, should be shortened by at least 30%

Author Response

PFA responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript focuses on building ecological niche models to examine the predictive distribution of two Sri Lankan bats using a time scaled approach, from the present to the future. The authors presented the most up to date species occurrence databases for Kerivoula picta and K. malpasi (K. hardwickii op cit.). The study is simple and straight forward: the authors provide a characterization of the potential available suitable habitat for each species and evaluate how this habitat may change in the future.

 

The manuscript is well written, although there are several instances throughout in which grammar could be improved and formatting mistakes should be corrected. Findings are presented in a descriptive way that sometimes falls a bit much on decomposing nitty-gritty aspects of the contributing factors to each species modeled distribution. The results and conclusions are drawn from direct evaluations of the models.

I recommend a reevaluation, or at least a clear justification, of the modeling approach to estimate the available suitable habitat (i.e. using different sets of variables to determine present vs. future distributions) because time-scaled predictions using different sets of variables cannot be directly compared. Also, the assessment of model performance, relying only on AUC values, should be revised and a different statistic should be run to confirm performance. The sampling of the rarer species, K. malpasi, should be carefully revised and records should be confirmed with specimen data. I included detailed comments and notes about all the points I listed above directly in the attached version of the manuscript. I hope these are informative and provide the authors with ideas for improvement of the manuscript.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Author Response

PFA responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I believe the authors made a significant effort in incorporating the reviewer's suggestions and the current version of the manuscript is greatly improved.