Quantifying Ecological Performance of Giant Panda Conservation: Evidence from Sichuan Province
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Quantifying Ecological Performance of Giant Panda Conservation: Evidence from Sichuan Province
In this study, Zhenjiang Song and Yi Li explore the changing and driving factors of landscape patterns in Sichuan giant panda habitats in China. They survey the structural changes in habitat over the past two decades, and they also evaluate the relative ecological niche widths and overlap of giant panda distribution areas in years 1995 and 2015. While the manuscript is generally well written, at times, the English is a bit awkward. It might help to seek further linguistic feedback from a native speaker.
- The Introduction section is very weak. Literature review has not done enough. The research question that is an essential element of research has not well developed. The objectives of this study are very limited.
- It would be interesting if authors can add more ecological data (e.g. distribution, population size, and feeding ecology) and the most important concerns about conservation of the species and its populations in the Introduction.
- The paper could be improved by a more comprehensive literature review of papers published on the habitat selection and niche modeling of giant panda. For example:
1) Han et al., 2019. Diet evolution and habitat contraction of giant pandas via stable isotope analysis. Current Biology, 29(4), pp.664-669.
2) Luna-Aranguré, C. and Vázquez-Domínguez, E., 2021. Of pandas, fossils, and bamboo forests: ecological niche modeling of the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) during the Last Glacial Maximum. Journal of Mammalogy.
3) Hull et al., 2014. A synthesis of giant panda habitat selection. Ursus, pp.148-162.
4) Qi et al., 2009. Ecological niche modeling of the sympatric giant and red pandas on a mountain-range scale. Biodiversity and Conservation, 18(8), pp.2127-2141.
5) Liu et al., 2021. Modeling Potential Dispersal Routes for Giant Pandas in Their Key Distribution Area of the Qinling Mountains, China. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9, p.222.
- In Line 93, replace “to” with “and”.
- In lines 95-98, add citation) for the meteorological and demographic data.
- Add more details on the satellite images, meteorological and demographic data used in the study.
- In line 56, replace “3,605.87 km2” with “3,606 km2”. Please check all numbers on this line.
- Move lines 55-70 to the Introduction section.
- Please combine lines 71-89 with the Introduction section.
- In the section of the study area, describe only the study area!
- In line 101, use the full title/term of GDP before using the acronym.
- Since there is only one target layer in the first column of Table 2, it is better to delete this column and add it to the table title.
- In line 123, replace “14 measurement indicators” with “18 measurement indicators”. There are 18 measurement indicators in Table 1, not 14 indicators.
- In the section of Ecological niche width level calculation for giant panda habitat, add citations for formulas from other references.
- Move lines 161-165 to the Introduction or Study area sections.
- Move lines 167-168 to the Methods section.
- Tables 2 and 3 are not easy to understand and describe. I suggest prepare these tables in such a way that the land use changes of the two periods of time are comprehensible to the reader. Also, the numbers in the text should be easily extractable from these tables.
- What is the definition of large blocks? What size blocks do you define as large blocks? It’s better to be detectable these blocks in a Figure.
- I suggest restructure the manuscript and add a Discussion section to make the manuscript more useful. For example, lines 179-187 read more as a discussion than a result.
- Move line 196-197 (Habitat quality can reflect biodiversity … for flagship species) to the Introduction section.
- Move lines 197-201 to the Methods section. How were threshold values for dividing habitat quality identified?
- Lines 206-207 do not agree with the numbers mentioned in the previous sentences.
- Explain more clearly what Figure 1. (A) shows.
- Move lines 216-217 to the Methods section.
- Replace Figure 2 with better quality. I suggest present the Figures covering the interesting results in the main body of the manuscript. And move other Figures to the Supplementary Materials.
- In line 324, replace “5 km2” with “5 km2”.
- It’s not clear how some measurement indicators such as x4 (Connectivity of giant panda habitat) were measured! how they have been verified! More details about the measurement indicators and calculating them should be described in the main text or the Supplementary Materials.
- See and use the following papers for more study on niche overlap and habitat connectivity;
1) Ashrafzadeh et al., 2020. A multi-scale, multi-species approach for assessing effectiveness of habitat and connectivity conservation for endangered felids. Biological Conservation, 245, p.108523.
2) Khosravi et al., 2021. Prey availability modulates predicted range contraction of two large felids in response to changing climate. Biological Conservation, 255, p.109018.
- Some parts of the paper can be reduced as they have been mentioned elsewhere, I suggest authors to remove repetitive parts to improve the paper readability.
- Many parts of the Results section read more as an intro than a result/discussion. For example, lines 316-321, 381-384, 400-402, and 407-408.
- Move Figure 8 to the Supplementary Materials.
Author Response
Dear editor and reviewer,
Thanks for your help. We have uploaded my response in the attachment. Please check.
Wish you all the best.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Review of Song and Li, giant pandas in Sichuan
This is a detailed analysis of giant panda habitat preferences in Sichuan. It relates the presence of pandas to a wide range of land use types. My two concerns are not that the paper is flawed in any significant way, but that it presents its results poorly and does not relate them well to the existing literature.
Data presentation. I find that with so many papers from China — including those I write with excellent colleagues —the figures are very complicated and have type that is almost impossible to read. Figure 1 is small, Figure 2 is impossible to read and the colours indistinguishable, figure 3 also has text too small to read, figure 4 I can read only when magnified considerably. Figure 5 is worse, I cannot read the legends on figures 6 and 7, and I cannot read the county names on figure 8.
There are excellent style guides in English and I’m sure there must be some in Chinese. Lettering needs to be large enough to be easily read.
Of even greater concern is what are the figures supposed to show? Figure 8A is supposed to show minority populations — it could do that without the county names and using different coloured backgrounds to show who lives were. (For instance, if one used say yellow for Tibetan and Blue for Yi, one could use green for where they both live.). 8B is supposed to show poverty, but it doesn’t show a measure of poverty. I can understand figures 6 and 7.
I don’t really understand what figure 4 and 5 are supposed to show, and figure 3 seems unnecessarily complicated.
Writing. While the English is OK, another bad habitat of my Chinese colleagues (and many others) is to use acronyms. Sentences such as
“The area of LH decreased by 2.31% (as shown in Figure 1b). In general, the areas of HH and M increased in the study area, while that of LL decreased.”
That is very hard to follow! I think this means, “The area of middle to lowest habitat quality decreased by 2.31%”. If so, it refers to figure 1b. Figure 1b I understand, though not figure 1 A. But I would understand it a lot better if LL was replaced by “lowest habitat quality”.
In general, avoid using acronyms — LH, LL, M, and all those others.
What have the authors done that is new? In part because the figures are hard to read and some complicated, it’s hard to know what the main results are. The authors summarise them in lines 471 to 481. My first question is if this is the main result, why do we need so many complicated figures to document it?
I urge the authors to list the results that matter and then only include the figures needed to show those results.
My second question: what have the authors done that is new? There are many papers on the changes in giant panda habitat. Some of this paper’s results seem to overlap with Xu et al. (Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2017) especially when it comes to habitat and habitat connectivity. Also from that group is Zhang et al. Ecosystem Services, 2020) that also shows changes in panda habitats over this period. This doesn’t mean this paper is wrong, but it’s hard to understand what it does that is different.
In short, there’s a lot of material here. It’s complicated, poorly presented, and needs to explain more clearly what it does that is different from previous studies.
Author Response
Dear aditor and reviewer,
Thanks for your help. We have uploaded my response in the attachment. Please check.
Wish you all the best.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
Thanks for your corrections!
Best
Author Response
We sincerely appreciate the comments from the reviewers. Thank you for your guidance and help.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have made minor improvements. The figures are still hard to understand and the paper I very confusing. It’s not that the paper is wrong, I should point it out, but not well explained.
Author Response
We agree with the reviewer. In Figure 1A, the change in transfer area among different levels of giant panda habitat quality during the past two decades, which aims to explain the the changes of landscape structure in the study area. In Figure 3, four pictures has shown the relative ecological niche widths of Sichuan giant panda distribution areas in 1995 and 2015 in four dimensions. In Figure 4, it is shown that the ecological niche overlap in giant panda distribution areas in Sichuan Province in 1995 is higher than that in 2015, which aims to explain the performance of giant panda conservation. And Figure 5A and Figure 5B have described the biotic factors in giant panda distribution areas in Sichuan Province between 1995 and 2015, which explain the increase of forest coverage and biodiversity during the past two decades. Therefore, these figures have explanatory function.
According to your guidance, I have used different coloured backgrounds to show the disturbance of minority populations and extreme poverty without the county names. Therefore, the notes in lines 471 to 481 are more important, which could explain the spatial heterogeneity in social factors.
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
