Characteristics of Fragments of Woodland and Their Influence on the Distribution of Soil Fauna in Agricultural Landscape

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

In my opinion your work is very interesting and valuable.

However, I noticed that in the „Results” section, the terms „numerous” and „frequent”, „dominant” and „frequent”are confused [168-178]. You write that the species is the most numerous and give its frequency, or you write that it is dominant and give the frequency. Probably you intended to give two parameters at once, but in my opinion it should be clarified.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you very much for your nice comments! We are glad for your notice - we corrected these unclear sentences.

Reviewer 2 Report

i) I recommend the authors correct the error in the references. For example, work number 54 is cited twice in the bibliography:

54. Bedford, S.E., Usher, M.B., 1994. Distribution of arthropod species across the margins of farm woodlands. Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment, 48(3), 295–305. https://doi.org/10.1016/0167-8809(94)90111-2

54. Mackovčin, P., 2000. A multi-level ecological network in the Czech Republic: Implementing the Territorial System of Ecological Stability. GeoJournal. 51, 211–220. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41147513

Only the paper of Bedford and Usher (1994) is cited in the manuscript's text. Mackovčin's work is not found in the text of the manuscript. 

ii) In the results and the discussion, the authors state that the most numerous groups in the epigeon of forest fragments and linear fragments are ground beetles (Carabidae). They found the presence of fifty-four species and 6500 individuals). I propose to briefly evaluate the percentage of the species and individuals capable of flight and what part of them are without the capability to take flight. Are there differences in the representation of these two groups of carabids between smaller, larger forest fragments and linear fragments in agricultural landscapes? I am asking for a very brief comment on this issue. 

After accepting these minor comments, which do not reduce the submitted manuscript's quality, I propose publishing the work in Diversity.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you very much for your kind evaluation. We omitted Mackovcin during the formatting of Ms for Diversity (numbering references), honestly, this one is very important, so we renumbered references!

The ability to fly - it is a very important notice, but we would like to evaluate this topic (including other ecological traits of captured assemblages) in the next paper. We just added a simple sentence in Results...

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an interesting manuscript about the characteristic of forested fragments and their influence on the epigeic fauna in agricultural landscape. The strength of the paper is the high amount of data collected. This research involved an enormous effort of sampling and determination (more than 10 000 individuals from six representative taxonomic group), and provides a very good overview of these organisms in a large region.

The introduction is well structured and review the most important papers from field.

In material and methods part the descriptions of studied fragments of woodland are clear and complete. A total number of 38 sites were selected and eight important characteristics of these sites are considered. The data obtained were evaluated using well-chosen statistical methods and the graphs are clear and easy to interpret.

The results are structured well and understandable, discussions includes the relevant works.

I suggest only one correction: in line 119 replace “3 people” with “three people”.

Based on remarks I suggest accepting the paper for publication in Dyversity.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thanks a lot for the nice words to our manuscript. We corrected this sentence.