Threat Perception, Emotions and Social Trust of Global Bat Experts before and during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a well-written paper that provides an interesting perspective on the relationship between subjective values, perceptions and emotions and an otherwise objective matter (bat conservation). I have some comments/suggestions regarding the analyses and presentation of results, but overall feel that this is an excellent contribution and congratulate the authors on their research.

Outside of the minor comments listed below, my main thought about the manuscript is the following: isn't it possible that the changes in emotion seen in bat experts might be related to the broader context of the emotional process in society as a whole, and not specifically to bats? I think this deserves some discussion. Personally, I feel that having lost friends/family in this pandemic has deeply changed everyone's outlook on life and increased our sense of fragility/compassion/sadness across the board. I work mostly with seabirds and I reckon that my outlook has changed due to the pandemic, even though public perceptions about my study species did not have a direct relationship to the virus/media coverage per se. So I can't help but suspect that the findings of this study, rather than being specific to the perceptions of bat experts because their study species were "blamed" for COVID in the media, are instead the result of a broader pattern in humanity and the fact that bat experts as just as human as anyone else!

 

102- Please provide some background as to how this internal list of emails came about, for example "it was compiled by author X over Y years working on bat research", "it was kindly provided by organization X and then expanded based on personal relationships from the authors", "it was compiled based on participants of X conference and Y workshop", etc. If you could provide a breakdown of the rough sociodemographics of this email list it'd also be interesting to get a sense of how much self-selection bias there might have been between those contacted and those who agreed to participate.

113 - Correct the URL to "www.worldvaluessurvey.org".

124 - Please indicate what R package (and its version) was used to do the EFA. Also, please note that R 3.3.3 is quite outdated so perhaps it'd be a good idea to re-run the analysis on a more recent version (current version is 4.2.1) just to check if there aren't any changes due to corrections in the software/package.

152 - Please indicate R package version

157 - Please indicate R package version

167 - A one-proportion test is necessary in order to state that the sex ratio was not different from 50:50. Else you could use a Fisher test (if excluding Diverse/NA) or chi-square test (if including them) to determine whether the sex ratio, even if slightly different from 50:50, was not different in the before/during groups.

184 - I believe the text starting with "Categories of open comments" was intended to be a new list item.

186 to 201 - This information would be better presented as a table or figrue instead of text. Rather than simply a list of countries, it'd be useful to also convey what proportion of interviewees from each country made open comments about each of these categories.

Table 2 - I understand why you would want to focus on the EFA factors, however I still think it'd be also useful to have Wilcoxon tests for the internal variables within each factor. This would give readers a better perspective on whether there are indications that some specific threats have seen a greater change in perception during COVID.

Table 2 - I think the first column should be left-aligned with different levels of paragraph indentation to clearly convery levels of categories. Also, shouldn't Compassion be under Positive and Sadness be under Negative? They look like separate variables, but I reckon this might be a formatting error.

205 - The text in this section gives me interpretation that the Wilcoxon tests were used to compare categories within groups (researchers were most trusted during the pandemic) and not between groups (trust on researchers was different between vs. during the pandemic). This is inconsistent with the between-groups approach used for the other variables in table 2, and is not in agreement with what was described in the Methods. If you're doing within-group comparisons that's great but then these need to be done consistently for all variables (and you also need to present between-group comparisons for social trust.

221 and Table 3 - "LL" might be a more intuitive abbreviation for log-likelihood.

Table 3 - I suggest using two separate tables to convey the results of models 1 and 2.

Table 3 - Since p-values are provided I don't think the asterisk notation is necessary - using bold to highlight significant values is enough.

Table 3 - I think the first column should be left-aligned with different levels of paragraph indentation to clearly convery levels of categories. Also not sure why there are three dots "..." at the start of some variables, perhaps this is a formatting error?

250 - To be fair, the perspective of bat experts is a very small niche within a LOT that is going on in societies worldwide right now, so I think the fact that it received little attention is not unexpected given the context.

254 - Confusing sentence, please rephrase.

268 - Would be useful to situate the timing of the study relative to when the first news came out speculating that SARS-CoV-2 was most closely related to bat viruses and when the news came out saying that is was most closely related to pangolin viruses.

313 - "Almost similar" is a bit of a stretch, there are a few noticeable differences (e.g. ages, professional background). Perhaps "broadly similar" would be a better way to phrase it.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The study presented an interesting and timely exploration how the current global pandemic changed experts’ threat perceptions on bats. The findings of this study is a significant step on integrative emotions to decision making and advancing the conservation planning of bats. The authors presented an important baseline information on this topic, however, I am concerned how the authors addressed the small number of respondents from regions/countries where bat biodiversity and threats are higher. The majority of the experts participated in the survey is coming from the Global north and very few from the Global south where bat biodiversity is higher and occurence of threats are intensified. I think the current results of the study does not really reflect the "global" expert perception and is too western centric. While I understand the challenge here but it needs to be emphasized in the paper and mention the important caveats of the current work.

Additional comments:

1. Add choropleth map showing number of respondents from each country so this will provide an insight where the responses are coming from

2. Add figure/s to visualise the results of the study. The result section contains too much information that is difficult to follow.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

I have gone through the submission entitled the influence of the COVID- 19 pandemic on global bat experts threat perception, emotions, and social trust. The study is detailed designed and well presented. All results were presented in tables and figures. Besides, I noticed minor typos in the abstract (Chiroptera must start a capital letter., and keywords have a missing letter "Keywaods:".).

Best regards,

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the authors' effort to revise and discuss some important gaps in the previous version of the paper. I have no further comments.