Drivers of the Structure of Mollusc Communities in the Natural Aquatic Habitats along the Valley of a Lowland River: Implications for Their Conservation through the Buffer Zones

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General Comments

Overall the paper is well written but it needs a good and thorough language revision throughout the text. Some sections/sentences need improvement. I have tried to correct some sentences but the authors should carefully revise the whole text.

The results are well described and explained efficiently in the discussion. However, your work and how this was executed should be better described in the methodology section (see detailed comments below).

In addition, you mentioned about landscape metrics, but there is no any mentioning in the text apart from the discussion. Did you use any landscape metrics? Where are the results?

 Abstract: The abstract needs improvement. In its current form does not provide any information about your study. You should indicate the research methods and/or study area that you used to answer your question. This part should be a straightforward description of what you did in one or two sentences. Finally, you should discuss the main conclusions of your research. You only discuss about the importance of NAHs. What is the key message?

 Line 21. Specify what kind of problem. i.e, environmental, ecological, etc?

Line 22: metrics are the outcomes of data – I suggest “metrics provide essential information about watersheds”

Lines 24. Correct to “environmental factors within buffer zones influencing mollusc communities” or “environmental factors within buffer zones that influenced mollusc communities”

Line 28. Mollusc samples were collected from each of NAHs - Delete “of “

 

Keywords: I suggest using other keywords that those already mentioned in the title. In this way you will increase search results and visibility of your study

 Introduction:

Line 46. Be more specific. What kind of problem?

Line 47. Correct to - It has been estimated that rivers only in one-third of the territory of the European Union have…

Lines 47-48. Correct as - Good ecological status of rivers is associated….(Delete the better)

Lines 53-54. Here you repeat what you have already written in the 1^st paragraph.

Lines 56-59. Please add references

Line 77. Correct to - diverse macrophyte and macroinvertebrate species.

What do you mean by “Even new”?

Line 83. Delete “What is more” – Write in a more academic style. E.g., Furthermore, or In addition, or Additionally, etc.

Line 98 - the area of the water bodies – Do you mean catchment area, water body size? Please be more specific.

 

Methods:

No any information on the sites - Please indicate how many sites were sampled.

 You should clearly state that you analyzed water samples, the frequency, etc. and then refer to the methodologies that are described in previous work.

How about the landscape metrics? Where are these? Which metrics did you use, how they were calculated, etc.

Results

 No any results about landscape metrics.

 Discussion

Lines 268-277. Please revise/restructure these two paragraphs. It is not clear what is the message here. I mean what is the purpose of the comparison with other different ecoregions?  

Section 4.2.

This section, is too broad and I don’t believe it is too relevant or gives any value to your study. You should principally focus with the species of your study area, not with the general EU red list. Thus, I suggest re-writing this section focusing on the species of your study area and their conservation status (IUCN) and their threats based on the results from your study.   

 Section 4.3.

There is no any description of the landscape metrics in the methods and results.

Overall the paper is well written but it needs a good and thorough language revision throughout the text.

Author Response

I am deeply grateful to Reviewer 1 for the valuable suggestions and for comments on the manuscript. I have included all of the remarks in the revised text. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

 

 

 

 

 

I suggest acceptance and publishing of manuscript with minor correction.

Comments and suggestions for authors have been attached.

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

The quality of the English language in the manuscript is acceptable and satisfactory.

Author Response

I am deeply grateful to Reviewer 2 for the valuable suggestions and for comments on the manuscript. I have included all of the remarks in the revised text. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

I found your manuscript "Drivers of the Sructure..." very interesting and relevant. there is a need for a review in order to present data more clearly and to discuss more precisely. Below are comments:

Line 24: Replace „influenced“ with „that influence“.

Lines 81-82: Replace „the valleys of rivers“ with „river valleys“

Line 82: Replace „encourage“ with „favour“.

Lines 99-92: Eutrophication is mentioned twice as a threat. Please change this.

Line 108. Replace “influenced“ with „that influence“.

2.1. Study area: I suggest to put the sentence “The study was…” as the first, and then put “This river and its valley in northwest Poland is an excellent….”

2.2. Field and laboratory methods. Authors need to specify how many of specific types they sampled (how many pools, oxbow lakes etc.). Also you need to write the number of replicate samples taken. 

Formula (1) for Shannon-Wiener indeks. Please use some other (older) references, this is well known indeks dating back to 1948.

Line 182: Remove “Relatively”, as those are low values for freshwaters.

Lines 184-192: It is not clear what are the results of post-hoc test. Also, Kruskal-Wallis ANOVA does not test for differences in the median values, but it operates with ranks.

Table 2. Please add full species names (author and year). Remove D% over each column and separate by line lowest rows with No. of individuals…. It would help to write the number of samples for each NAH type.

Title of 3.3. Mollusc communities in relation to the spatial structure of the buffer zones and catchments should be changed as you also analyse physical and chemical water properties. There is no need to repeat abbreviations from Figure 3 in the text.

The section “4.1. Natural aquatic habitats along the river valley as refuges for molluscs“ does not fit the title. Authors refer to their previous survey “Zawal et al 2014”, so they have the data on mollusc community in the river. So, if they want to assess the potential of NAHs investigated as refuges, they should state are there some species that are no longer present in the river (or population in the river declined, while NAH provided better habitat).

Lines 281-284: Rephrase the sentence “Among them…” as it is not clear what did you want to say.

Line 333: Delete “sources of”

Line 334: Delete “that”

Lines 334-338: Discuss the possible reasons why is D. polymorpha absent from the river, and present in the NAHs. What are the implications of that for conservation? Are NAHs taken that in consideration also possible source of IAS?

Line 408: Replace Økland [60] and Økland [61] with Økland [60, 61].

Line 409: Replace “at about pH 6.0.” with “at ph of around 6.0.”

Line 411: You wrote “In contrast to the lotic habitat…”, but then you write about results from lotic habitat. Did you mean “to the lentic habitats”?

Line 418. Replace “The land use that surrounds water bodies within 100 m strongly influenced…” with “Land use within 100 m of water bodies has a strong influence ….“

Lines 434-458: In those two paragraphs the authors should be more oriented on their results, as this could be a part of the introduction. So, change those paragraphs starting from discussion of your results in terms of conservation and diversity.

Title “4.5. A roadmap for the conservation and management plans for the river, water bodies (NAHs) and the adjacent habitats through the buffer zones” uses NAHs as abbreviation for water bodies, and it is not. So, use only NAHs.

Lines 473-474: Rephrase the sentence “The BOD reflected organic pollution, which affects the water quality, was also high.”

Line 482: Add “for” after “need”, add “of” after “implementation”.

Line 494: Replace “whole” with “all”.

In section 4.5. you write about Unionidae, however, they were absent from habitats investigated. Instead of relatively long paragraph dealing with their protection in EU and Poland (I suggest to omit the part about LIFE4delta project, as it is not relevant for your data), I strongly advise you to discuss did you expect to find unionid taxa in investigated habitats, do you have some previous data on them in those habitats, maybe even from local people etc.

Line 589: Remove “climate”, as it is strangley used (increasing the climate?!).

I suggest to shorten the Conclusion section.  

 

Best regards.

English language requires only minor editing.

Author Response

I am deeply grateful to Reviewer 3 for the valuable suggestions and for comments on the manuscript. I have included all of the remarks in the revised text. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Revised and polished review comments: This study focuses on investigating the community structure of mollusks in natural freshwater habitats and the associated environmental factors. Overall, it is an excellent research article characterized by a substantial amount of data, compelling results, and clear presentation. However, one limitation is that the data used in the study is over a decade old.  to improve the overall quality and enhance the reader's understanding of the study., I have the following suggestions:

 

1.  incorporate color in Figure 1 and Figure 3 to enhance visual representation.

2. In Figure 3, it would be better  to utilize different colors to distinguish species and environmental factors, thereby improving clarity for readers.

3.  to conduct significance tests to determine the impact of these environmental factors in the RDA analysis.

4. It would be valuable to include a geographic distribution map of a significant species to provide additional insights.

Author Response

I am deeply grateful to Reviewer 4 for the valuable suggestions and for comments on the manuscript. I have included all of the remarks in the revised text. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf