Methodology for Identifying Ecological Corridors: A Spatial Planning Perspective
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Well done! All my previous suggestions were well addressed by the authors.
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors, just a few details:
Figure 1 - put a black scale bar in the middle in the map (not it is close to the left). Change Kilometres just into "km". Do it consequently in each figure.
Line 159 - it will be safer to write (even 150 km daily), because we don't divide migrations distance into male and females, etc.
Figure 2 - better quality of the figure is visible. I would put blue arrow identical, symetric, in the middle. But - in the blue figure on the left - please check, it should be 4. or 3. with "Defining...." ?
Table 1 - why 1.1. is written without bold like 1.2. etc? The same issue was in Figure 1, blue - 1, but 2 and 4
Line 258 - put at least small break after table but before Line 258. The same after 261 line.
Line 410 - Figure 10 - add a scale bar in the map.
Compare localizations of black dots in lines 472, 503, 507, 589 with 568 (here move to the right) .
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.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The MS presents a habitat suitability model alongside a least cost path model for Brown bears in Romania. The issue of identifying corridors for wildlife is pressing and essential for the conservation of biodiversity. The approaches used by the authors are not particularly novel, and in the case of the habitat suitability model downright outdated. The MS could serve as a good example application but falls short because the data available have not been explored as fully as they could. The methods are poorly described or completely undescribed, making this work impossible to repeat. In places the article reads like a summary of necessary changes to legislation in Romania to implement a specific EU policy. While this is also important, it isn’t the stated aim of the MS, and as a result the MS doesn’t do that well either.
For example, the habitat suitability model is constructed from several data layers that are combined using weights. How were these weights defined? By experts? Which experts? There clearly is data on brown bear abundance (Fig. 12F), why was this data not leveraged to build a statistical habitat quality model? Given the weights for each category in a layer, how are these combined to produce a value for each pixel? In lines 262 – 266 the only hint is that a “weighted geometric mean” was used to calculate the weights. It is not clear to me how this statistic (it’s not an algorithm) “better reflects the real situation.” Finally, it appears that the habitat suitability model was not used to model the core habitat areas, rather these were defined as being equivalent to the Natura 2000 areas (Line 292).
Similar comments apply to the models of resistance at the national scale and permeability at the local scale. Why are these two things considered to be different? It seems like the same data is available at both scales, with the addition of bear abundance and some additional barriers that could be identified by field work. Why would the county scale be calculated at 25 m x 25 m resolution, while the national scale is 30 m x 30 m? The additional gain in resolution would have trivial impact on the habitat or resistance models.
Lines 70-72 – there is no specific “ecological theory”, there are many ecological theories, one of which is the habitat fragmentation hypothesis. I suggest deleting everything from “… based on ecological theory …” to the end of the sentence.
Figure 5 (which is a table, not a figure), for the land cover layer at the national level it would work better to match the layout to the other layers, with seasons in columns and the land cover categories in rows. Also, in seasons 1-3 there are only 5 weights for 6 categories. Which one is left out?
In general, different figures of the same quantities should share the same scale in terms of color and categorization. For example, figure 8 and figure 13a both present “resistance” or “permeability”, at the two different extents. They should appear similar to facilitate comparison.
Line 335 “… there are no steep slopes in the mountainous area of the county” I don’t understand this assertion. I see many red pixels indicating the steepest category in the north of the county.
In the discussion at line 353 the headline reads “validation of results” but there is no independent validation – which would imply observations of bears using corridors predicted here more than other areas. Another useful comparison would be to compare the corridors identified at the national scale and the county scale. Are they the same? If not, why not?
Lines 426 – 428 “This example shows that our top-down approach is correct, …” No, it shows that you did the same thing as someone else. Demonstrating that the top-down approach is better than a bottom up approach would require some comparison of the two different ways of building multi-scale plans. If you implemented ecological networks independently for each county, and then aggregated those to the national scale, you could then compare that network with the one built entirely at the national scale.
Lines 437-438 “That is why the proposed methodology represents a novelty, especially from the point of view of its associated multi-level approach.” I have to disagree; you cite a paper on identifying corridors using least-cost paths from 2003, and a quick literature search shows hundreds of examples in the last few years alone. In addition, nothing in the MS is explicitly multi-scale in nature. You carried out the analysis at 2 separate extents, but did no comparison to show that one was better or even different from the other.
Line 553 “…and mirrored the megalomaniac dreams of the president.” While this may be true, it is not appropriate in a scientific article without a specific citation supporting the assertion that the president’s dreams were megalomaniacal.
Reviewer 2 Report
The present research aims to identify a methodology for identifying ecological networks and corridors in Romania for the brown bear and show how it can be adapted and applied to different spatial scales, starting from the national one. This manuscript is well organized and the drawn conclusions are coherent with the obtained results. However, references should be updated to included more recent studies. Our findings suggest that the implementation of ecological corridors in current planning practice must be done cautiously, provided the possible restrictions imposed to economic activities by plans, and highlight the importance of field data in increasing the scientific soundness of results.
Lines 29 – 30: To arrange the keywords alphabetically.
Lines 53 – 54: I think that you should add these recent references to support this your sentence “Urbanization, economic development, expansion of transport networks and land use change are causing habitat fragmentation, reducing connectivity and creating artificial barriers along wildlife routes.”. I would like to suggest:
Smeraldo, S., et al. (2020). Modelling risks posed by wind turbines and power lines to soaring birds: The black stork (Ciconia nigra) in Italy as a case study. Biodiversity and Conservation, 29(6), 1959-1976.
Nadal, J., et al. (2022). Crossing artificial obstacles during migration: The relative global ecological risks and interdependencies illustrated by the migration of common quail Coturnix coturnix. Science of the Total Environment, 808, 152173.
Lines 53 – 141: Please, drastically reduce this part of the manuscript.
Lines 151 – 153: I think that you should add this recent reference to support this your sentence “The most widely used methods for assessing environmental connectivity include the least cost path method (a widely used GIS application), the graph theory, the circuit theory, individual movement models, or landscape networks.”. I would like to suggest:
Kabir, M., et al. (2017). Habitat suitability and movement corridors of grey wolf (Canis lupus) in Northern Pakistan. PloS one, 12(11), e0187027.
Lines 242 – 244: I think that you should add this recent reference to support this your sentence “The proposed methodology for identifying ecological networks and corridors for the brown bear in Romania, both nationally and in a county, is a useful tool for central and local authorities involved in environmental and spatial planning and for all organizations interested in maintaining conservation connectivity and migration of large carnivores.” I would like to suggest:
Goursi, U. H., et al. (2021). Spatial distribution of the threatened Asiatic black bear in northern Pakistan. Ursus, 2021(32e13), 1-5.
Lines 348 – 350: I think that you should add these recent references to support this your sentence “a conservation practice that is becoming even more relevant in the face of impending climate change” I would like to suggest:
Smeraldo, S., et al. (2021). Generalists yet different: Distributional responses to climate change may vary in opportunistic bat species sharing similar ecological traits. Mammal Review, 51(4), 571-584.
Ali, H., et al. (2021). Expanding or shrinking? range shifts in wild ungulates under climate change in Pamir-Karakoram mountains, Pakistan. PloS one, 16(12), e0260031.
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Authors,
I will describe my remarks line by line:
Line 20, 23 - close neighborhood of a word „our”. Maybe in line 20 use „The study…”
34 – change [1, 2, 3] into [1,2,3]. in other places – similar, without a space between numbers.
42, 53, 60, 71, 81, 201, 202, 216, 219, etc. – we don’t put words not in Latin in Italics. To confirm it please ask Editor, but it is not incompatible with MDPI; requirements.
87-89 – stepping stones are a different kind of corridors. They are not elements of ecological corridors. Probably you mean core and edge habitats (buffer zone) inside strip corridor, in opposite to line corridor only with edge habitats.
Stepping stones are functional corridors, but not structural like line or strip corridors. They constists many Island inside matrix, but not structurally connected with themselves.
119 – Figure 1. First column. The last line – Ecological networks in Spatial Planning – put small letters spatial planning and please center vertically fourth record.
154 – „[27, 2827based” – there is some Misteka here
178 – Ursus arctos –add ‘L. 1758’ – you mentioned the species for the first time. Move a scale in the middle.
179 – The brown bear travels long distances – please add how long distance, try to specify in ().
191 – Figure 2 – add ‘e’ to Ukraine on the map
225 – Figure 3 – in 1 brackets - not „the Brown bear” – you don’t men a specific individual, but the species. Just brown bear.
248 - ArcGIS 10.x – instead of x put a specific number
253/281 – Figure 4/Figure 6 – please add a table in good quality (probably it Has been paste as figure that’s why) and the same font like whole article text. Centre everything inside this table.
269 – Figure 5 – the same remarks as above.
298 – Figure 7 and others – legend: Rather - country border. Change on each figure.
316, 279 – Lack of ă in Buzău. Check it in whole text, also on maps (like e.g. 2, 5 and 10).
345 – [1, 35] modify into [1,35] and others the same in whole text,
354 – instead of „and in a county” consider to change „region al or local”, it will better corresponds with ‘nationally’ Word
389 – in my opinion such detailed fragment about Slovakia is not needed
444 – „The methodology is also a technically novel approach” – it nos a novel approch. In my opinion „….the proposed methodology combines GIS techniques and tools with mathematical modeling, combining environmental, geographical, and land use information.” – sorry but it is not original, researchers all around world use sucha a methods. Second thing – a reviewer should underline novelty, not authors. I don’t mean it is wrong, but not original approach.
Good luck
W.
