Habitat Modification Alters Food Web Interactions with Focus on Biological Control of Aphids in Apple Orchards
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript is well written, clearly addressing the interrelationships between an aphid community, their relationships with host plants, and their natural enemies. The methodology employed comprises a meta-analysis and two field experiments. The statistics seemed adequate and successful in showing the principal results and therefore the conclusions seemed robust and original.
Introduction - Although several essential aspects have been raised, the introduction is too long. I suggest that what is critical is kept in it, and the text is more direct and objective.
The way of representing the data in figure 1 is not correct. The data is categorical, and the representation is continuous, connected by a line. This line is unreal, as the data between each date does not exist and has been arbitrarily placed there. For the graphs to be correctly represented, they must be in bars, discrete for each collection date.
The entire paragraph from line 381 to 393 is mistakenly placed in the discussion and strikes me as typical introductory text.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We have carefully revised the manuscript in view of the constructive and helpful comments as outlined below and the paper is now ready to resubmit. We have the honour to provide you below our responses (highlighted in blue) to the reviewer concerns on our manuscript ID sustainability-2277261 entitled “Habitat modification alters food web interactions with focus on biological control of aphids in apple orchards” which we have already received from you. We hope that you find our responses satisfactory and that the manuscript is now acceptable for publication.
Reviewer 1
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The manuscript is well written, clearly addressing the interrelationships between an aphid community, their relationships with host plants, and their natural enemies. The methodology employed comprises a meta-analysis and two field experiments. The statistics seemed adequate and successful in showing the principal results and therefore the conclusions seemed robust and original.
Introduction - Although several essential aspects have been raised, the introduction is too long. I suggest that what is critical is kept in it, and the text is more direct and objective.
Based on the related comment, we have revised the entire text of the introduction in order to shorten and be more related to the aim of the study.
The way of representing the data in figure 1 is not correct. The data is categorical, and the representation is continuous, connected by a line. This line is unreal, as the data between each date does not exist and has been arbitrarily placed there. For the graphs to be correctly represented, they must be in bars, discrete for each collection date.
Based on the related comment, we have replaced line charts included in the figure 1 by bar charts.
The entire paragraph from line 381 to 393 is mistakenly placed in the discussion and strikes me as typical introductory text.
Based on the related comment, we have introduced the mentioned paragraph in the introduction section.
Sincerely yours,
Authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
As the biological control of the aphids become much more important, submitted manuscript is good enough to publish. These studies are preliminary and it has been considered that it is going to encourage many researchers to conduct smilar studies in near future. The only suggestion for authors is that some parts especially Material and Methods should be shortened to follow easily.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We have carefully revised the manuscript in view of the constructive and helpful reviewer comments as outlined below and the paper is now ready to resubmit. We have the honour to provide you below our responses (highlighted in blue) to the reviewer concerns on our manuscript ID sustainability-2277261 entitled “Habitat modification alters food web interactions with focus on biological control of aphids in apple orchards” which we have already received from you. We hope that you find our responses satisfactory and that the manuscript is now acceptable for publication.
Reviewer 2
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
As the biological control of the aphids become much more important, submitted manuscript is good enough to publish. These studies are preliminary and it has been considered that it is going to encourage many researchers to conduct similar studies in near future. The only suggestion for authors is that some parts especially Material and Methods should be shortened to follow easily.
Based on the related comment, we have revised the entire text of Material and Methods and adapted the text when possible to clarify each point mentioned in this section. The other sections were also revised considering all reviewers’ comments.
Sincerely yours,
Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments are given in the article.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We have carefully revised the manuscript in view of the constructive and helpful editorial and reviewer comments as outlined below and the paper is now ready to resubmit. We have the honour to provide you below (and also in the related pdf) our responses (highlighted in blue) to the reviewer concerns on our manuscript ID sustainability-2277261 entitled “Habitat modification alters food web interactions with focus on biological control of aphids in apple orchards” which we have already received from you. We hope that you find our responses satisfactory and that the manuscript is now acceptable for publication.
Reviewer 3
Comments and Suggestions for Authors.
Comments are given in the article.
All comments were carefully checked and answered accordingly. Our answers to the related comments are presented hereafter and also inserted in the corresponding pdf received from Reviewer 3.
- Based on the related comment, we have added the Latin names to the aphid species in the first paragraph after the text revision (page 2).
- Based on the related comment, we have also added the Latin name to the cherry aphid species in the first paragraph after the text revision (page 2).
- Indeed, we have forgotten to remove this part (it was part from the manuscript template) from the mentioned text; thus, we have removed this part in the revised version (page 3).
- Based on the related comment, we have added the references used in the identification of aphid parasitoids recorded in the presence study (page 3).
- It was inserted by mistake; we have infested artificially the cherry trees by aphids from the second week of April, and the monitoring was started from 20 April, thus we have corrected this sentence accordingly (page 3).
- We have corrected to 20th April, see our answer to the previous related comment (page 3).
- We have corrected the word accordingly (page 3).
- Based on the related comment, we have added the references used in the identification of aphid parasitoids recorded in the presence study (page 4).
- Indeed, we have corrected the dates written by mistake (page 4).
- In 2015, the monitoring of population dynamic using the protocol mentioned above was started on 20th April. At that date the natural population of target aphids were already observed (on the first week of April) active on apple and cherry trees. However, we used only the data collected from 20 April in the analysis in order to compare with the data of experiment conducted in 2016. We have revised the related sentence to clarify that point (page 4).
- We agree that the related text was not clear, and we have revised this text to be clearer accordingly.
- We have revised accordingly (page 5).
- We have revised accordingly (page 5).
- We have revised accordingly (page 5).
- The related quantitative overlap diagram corresponding the data presented in the paragraph (3.1.2) was generated by the statistical software. When the difference is small (symmetric interaction as in this case), it becomes difficult to distinguish the differences through the diagram, and in this case we think that the related numbers which cited in the text (see section 3.1.2) are the easiest way to understand the nature of indirect interactions (highlighted in the diagram) between aphids mediated by natural enemies. Moreover, and on our knowledge, we think that there is no other graph type to show such kind of quantitative overlap (page 5).
- We have revised the table according to the related comment (page 6).
- We have revised accordingly (page 8).
- We have revised accordingly (page 8).
Sincerely yours,
Authors
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
