Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: STRUCTURE AND FUNCTIONS OF YELLOW-BREASTED BOUBOU (LANIARIUS ATROFLAVUS) SOLOS AND DUETS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Some minor copy editing is needed to correct typos and improve the written English, but overall the basic reporting is clear and sufficient.

Raw data are provided. It would also be useful if example sound files were included as supplementary material so that readers could listen to the different vocalizations.
Experimental design: This is a descriptive study, rather than an experiment.  The methods and analyses are appropriate.  Data such as these are critical to facilitate future comparative studies.

The only shortcoming is in Figure 2.  Plots of PC analyses used to differentiate songs from different individuals are provided, but no details on these analyses are provided other than a very short descriptor on line 249.
If the PC analysis is described in another study I would remove the PC plots and just leave the spectrograms.  Alternatively, the methods for the PC analysis could be added as supplementary information.
Validity of the findings: Meets journal standards.
Additional comments: Kroodsma and Byers (1991) wrote "to experiment first is human, to describe first, divine."  Descriptive studies such as this one are the foundation on which experimental and hypothesis-testing work can be conducted. Thus I congratulate the authors on providing a thorough and detailed description of vocalizations for this duetting bird species.

The article is generally clear.  I think the discussion could be shortened. There is quite a bit of comparison with other boubou species that can be removed to make this paper more focussed, and comparisons across species could be the topic of a comparative or review paper.

Minor comments:
line 121: it is not clear what "species-adequate" means
line 144: monochromatic to human visual systems, not necessarily to birds
l. 143: change sols to solo
l 351 change sinfle to single
l 364, the interpretation of these calls indicating alarm or excitement do not have any evidence provided.  These interpretations should be removed, or clearly indicated as speculation.
l. 424 how were these apparent threats observed based on songmeter recordings?
l. 426  remove extraneous text


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: STRUCTURE AND FUNCTIONS OF YELLOW-BREASTED BOUBOU (LANIARIUS ATROFLAVUS) SOLOS AND DUETS
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors addressed correctly all my coments
Experimental design: The methods improved with the changes conducted
Validity of the findings: The manuscript is still very focused in a genus of birds, which will reduce the manuscript impact
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: HIGH MICROPHONE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO ENHANCES ACOUSTIC SAMPLING OF WILDLIFE
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: I think that it is a very interesting paper filling a clear gap in the literature. The authors did a really great job and I would like to congratulate them. I have just two major comments and a list of minor comments that I hope may help to improve the current version of the manuscript, which I think that is worthy of publication once these issues have been solved.

I think that there adequate references not included in the text that need to be included and what is more important considered them to improve the Introduction about what is already known and improve the discussion of your results. These references may also help to support some of the assumptions or definitions made by the authors that are currently no supported for references. I feel that a carefull reading of the following references (and cite when appropiate) may improve your text and provide more info to readers interested on further information.
a)	In the Fristrup and Mennit (2012) and Obris et al. (2010) works there are a section dedicated to microphones and explaining some of the reasoning and definitions included in your reference. They could be a good starting point for readers interested on Reading more about this topic.
Obrist MK, Pavan G, Sueur J, Riede K, Llusia D, Márquez R. (2010). Bioacoustics approaches in biodiversity inventories. Abc Taxa 8:68-99.
Fristrup, K. M., and D. Mennitt. 2012. Bioacoustical monitoring in terrestrial environments. Acoustics Today 8(3):16-24.
b) There are two studies that compared the effectiveness of recorders for bird monitoring that should be read and cited in the text (see also minor comments). Among them it could more interesting to read carefully the one carried out by Rempel et al. (2013), since they make references to the SNR of the recorders tested.
Rempel RS, Francis CM, Robinson JN, Campbell M. (2013). Comparison of audio
recording system performance for detecting and monitoring songbirds. J Field Ornithol 84:86-97.
Pérez-Granados C, Bota G, Giralt D, Albarracín J, Traba J. (2019). Cost-effective assessment of five audio recording systems for wildlife monitoring: differences between recording distances and singing direction. Ardeola 66:311-325.
c)	The study of Turgeon et al. (2017) although cited in the text I also believe that that deserves more attention. For example they compared the SNR of the microphones that they used with the ones given by the manufacturer and some of their statements are very similar to some of yours. I quote a few examples:
“Furthermore, we show that lower microphone sensitivity reduces the effective area sampled by a microphone and thus induces distance-related biases in detection probability for all species”. It is in agreement with your results, and might be nice to say something in the Introduction.
“Furthermore, automated detection or recognition software will likely be more affected by worn microphones compared with human analysts because noise impedes the ability of automated recognizers to detect sounds (Bardeli et al. 2010).” Check the Bardeli reference but this assumption migth be also considered.
“Performing a single point check using a commercially available 1 KHz/94 dB sound level calibrator should be sufficient to identify microphones with poor sensitivity because sensitivity loss appears to be greatest in the low frequencies.” Maybe some discussion with your results could be started from here.

There some other references that I feel adequate included in the minor comments, but I think that a carefull read of these five references might be interesting before starting the review.
Experimental design: The section dedicated to statistical methods needs to be improved. This is a section that deserves more attention to understand the results and have some chances of replicate the analyses or make future comparisons. I think that you should create a subheading where the readers may look into what analyses you did. I have added some minor comments about it when reviewing the text, but the main point is that the methods applied are not described or described with little detail.
Validity of the findings: No comment. I trust on the results although an enlarged explanation of the methods employed (statistical methods) is needed.

I would like to ask to the authors about why they did not test for differences in quality among the six recorders employed in the study. They found differences between the manufacturer specifications and the “real” ones for the microphones, so why they did not assess for diferences in the recorders employed? I truly believe in your results but I hope you see my point.
Additional comments: Minor comments.

Introduction:
L. 44. I feel that the reference to Darras et al. 2019 should be changed for a more appropiate one (e.g. Sugai, L. S. M., Silva, T. S. F., Ribeiro Jr, J. W., & Llusia, D. (2019). Terrestrial passive acoustic monitoring: review and perspectives. BioScience, 69(1), 15-25).
L. 46. I see the point, but microphone quality is not the only factor that determines whether the recordings quality is sufficient to detect animal sounds. There other factors, such as background noise, distance of the vocalizing animal, singing direction, other taxa vocalizing at the same time, etc. I totally understand what the authors want to say, but try to clarify.
L. 48-61. Maybe try to add some adequate references about SNR or SPL. Likely most of the sentences of the text have been read from some study, cite some general studies with these definitions (e.g. SPL as 20 times the logarithm of ratio of the sound pressure to…. or SNR as the 10 times the logarithm of ratio of a standard’s signal). See some of my “general references”.
L. 65: Please, replace this reference of Venier for the two more appropiate testing the utility of different recorders for bird monitoring (Rempel et al. 2013 and Pérez-Granados et al. 2019). These authors tested the effectiveness of a large number of recorders under different circumstances, such as distance or singing direction or devices cost. These two references are a better background for readers interested on the topic. Maybe the Venier reference does not need to be removed if the authors consider it interesting, but add the other two.
L. 67. Remove space after “2018”. And valorate if the term “For example” might me better than “Indeed”.
L. 74. As I said before valorate if the results of the Rempel study are worthy to be cited here too.
L. 76-77. Are you sure that the Kaplan reference is valid for the statement that “high signal-to-noise ratios should facilitate the automated detection of animal sounds”? It is only that I look too old and for sure automated detection have improved a lot since this year and what he said may not be longer na issue. Even, after reading the study I am not sure if Kapplan applied automated detection.
L. 78. Why bat surveys? I guess that this assumption should be valid for all monitored taxa, and this work is not focused on bats.
L. 81. Use a different term than “our”.
L. 83. “their” sampling efficiency?
L. 86. We tested (in past)
L. 90. Maybe use something like “we assessed whether” is more adequate than “we demonstrate”.
Material and methods
L. 96. When I read the abstract (“We tested 24 different microphones”) I expected to find a comparison of 24 different microphones. However, you assessed “only” 12 microphones (two replicates of each). The study is still nice and interesting, but clarify that you tested 12 types of microfones and not 24 different microphones in the abstract and throughout the text.
L. 96. I think the term “quality” is subjective (high, low, medium?), maybe the term settings/configurations or other similar is more adequate.
L. 117-118. How much was that lost? You are doing an statement without any reference, so I have to assume that it is based on personal observation (although not said). This lost is interesting to make comparisons on further studies (thay may choose for removing  or not the wind screens) or to calibrate them on future research, since probably most of future surveys aiming to perform long-term surveys (one of the main advantages of acoustic monitoring) will use the microphones with wind screens.
L. 123-124. The different types of microphones were tested in the same position in the recorders? I mean, the first unit of microphone “A” was tested on the right channel of the recorder “A”. Then, the second unit of the microphone type “A” was also placed in the right channel of the recorder “A” or it was random?
L. 136. There are pictures of how silent recordings were recorded? It would be nice to add this picture as Supplemental or even in the main text, since it may help readers to understand the methodology applied.
 L. 183-186. But what was the analyses? Which software and function did you use? What was the variable response and the predictor? Did you check the model? Much more info is needed.
L. 215: Cite some studies showing these effects of habitat or singing directions.
L. 215-218. I think that this section deserves more attention. You should clearly clarify that you are making a specific test for your study, but that the detection ranges provided here are not, are may not be, equal to the effective detection radius. I know it and I understand what you did, but I think that it is easy that some readers may use your detection areas as effective detection radius if using the same microphone. There are studies showing that the Song Meter-II recorder (that likely used some of the microphones tested in your study) was able to effectively record bird vocalizations at a distances further than 150 m (see Rempel et al. 2013, Turgeon et al. 2017 and Pérez-Granados et al. 2019).
L. 220-223: Only one round means 12 microphones? Provide info about recording Schedule, format of recording, sample and bit rate, date, etc.
L. 233. Calls less than 15 s for the same bird? It is not possible that two birds vocalize in the same 15 s? Please, clarify this selection which seems arbitrary.
L. 244-246. It is impossible to valorate the statistical analyses section. There is no info about the recording schedule, which function in R was applied (please cite the packages used too), how was the model evaluated, etc. Looking to the graph 2 it seems that you used day as random factor besides you only had three monitoring days. If that is the case this statistical analyses might not be adequate since using a random factor with such small number of levels is not a good approach (a minimum number of five levels is recommended). I consider to reading more about that and if I am correct using day as factor in a GLM. Likely, your results will be pretty the same.
L. 264. Please cite some previous studies that have used the same approach and defined this term. I also consider that you should use the term that is usually used when testing the recognizer performance (recall rate), since it may help readers to understand what you did. (Knight, E., Hannah, K., Foley, G., Scott, C., Brigham, R., & Bayne, E. (2017). Recommendations for acoustic recognizer performance assessment with application to five common automated signal recognition programs. Avian Conservation and Ecology, 12(2):14)
L. 267-269. More info is required to understand what are “external” templates.

Results:
I think that this section could be improved by adding some table or figure summarizing the main results. The section is very nice and well written but sometimes just difficult to follow. Maybe you could add in Table 1 the SNR of the microphones provided by the manufacturer and the ones measured in the field.
Again the section dedicated to external detection templates was difficult to understand. Maybe it is my fault, of course, but please, try to clarify this section in methods and results to avoid confussion.
L. 296-299. I think that these sentences should be moved to methods.

Discussion:
I think that could be also interesting to discuss something about how most of previous studies focused their main goals in comparing recorders but they did not pay attention to microphones, besides likely they are more important than the recording unit itself. In this sense your study is filling a clear gap.
L. 349. In the Rempel et al. 2013 study they find almost the same and included a picture of the sonogram of the same call recorded at different distances to see the diferences between recorders, making some reference about their SNR. Please, check it.
L. 353.355. Almost the same. I think that this statement that you are doing here is pretty the same that Pérez-Granados et al. 2019 already did using also automated recognition software. When focusing in the tests carried out at favourable singing direction and the SM2 recorder (likely very similar to the SM2Bat of your study) they found that the total number and percentage of bird songs recognized in respect to total songs uttered by playback was almost the double when using the own recording of the SM2 that when using the calls broadcast by the playback (material appendix). I think that it means the same that what you are saying here (it is better to use the own recording collected by the recorder that using reference material). In that case could be nice to support your results in this prior work.
L. 377. I guess you mean “total cost of recorders”.
L. 383-384. “Also, sub-optimal recordings from low-quality microphones can be used too by sampling for longer durations to obtain higher vocalisation activities”. How it works? I guess that the mean parameters that alter how long you can record are sample rate and format (mp3, wav, wac). However, I cannot see how using a microphone with different SRN may make you record for longer durations.
L. 384: Valorate if saying “the results may depend.
L. 394-395. Order references by time. With these prices (less than 5 E per microphone), I think that a recommendation could be just to replace microphones at least once per year. This is not money for most projects, for the price of just one SM2Bat unit you can replace hundreds of microphones.

Conclusions:
L. 397-398. I think that SNR is already a standard metric for assessing microphone quality. The problem is that very little attention have been paid to measure the SNR of the microphones or at least make a small test of the microphones/recorders to be used. I think that as a conclusion of the study you should say something about the need to describe the type and the SNR of microphones employed in future studies on a similar way that almost every study describe the sampling and bit rate employed for recording. It will facilitate future comparisons and provide more date to undertand the results obtained in future studies. As guidance, Turgeon et al. (2017) said “It would allow the inclusion of microphone sensitivity as a covariate in statistical models to potentially adjust for differences in detection between sites or years”.

Abstract:
 L. 25. You should say that you tested 12 type of microphones (add if you want that two replicates per test).
L. 27-29. I think that the interesting point is not that you measured these variables (other studies did before), the interesting point is that you assessed the relationship between SNR of the microphones and these variables.

Table 1: The SNL and SPL provided are the ones provided by the manufacturer? Please, clarify.
Fig. 1. It would be very nice to see the effect of the singing direction on the sound detection space by showing the results of your playbacks from different sides of the recorder on a 3D or circular graph. This new graph may help to understand how the sound detection space varies with the location of vocalizing animals, which may have great consequences about how placing the recorders in future surveys.
Fig. 4. This result is amazing and clearly suggest thet need to estimate the recall rate of the recognizers employed on every single study, even if using a small proportion of the recordings since the recall rate may greatly differ with the microphone employed. Thanks, very interesting. Assess if including something about it in the Discussion.

Supplemental Figures: There are lot of figures that are not cited in the text. I am not aware of the PeerJ but likely citing Figure S4 but not the previous is not correct.  Likewise, I think that it could be interesting to upload all these figures in TIF, PNG or JPEG, since likely there will be lot of readers not able to open EPS figures.

References:
This section needs to be checked carefully. There are plenty of references with different style. In some of them (e.g. Gibb et al. ) the year of the publication is not provided, in others the authors cite et al. when there are several authors while in others add “…”. Likewise, in some references (e.g. Turgeon et al.) the number of the article is not provided. For some references a letter after the year should be added (e.g. there is Darras et al. 2019b but not Darras et al. 2019a).

Thanks for this work,
Cristian Pérez-Granados.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: HIGH MICROPHONE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO ENHANCES ACOUSTIC SAMPLING OF WILDLIFE
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: This manuscript report how distinct signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of microphones can potentially impact biodiversity acoustic monitoring. As open-source platforms of sensor for biodiversity monitoring are increasingly being adopted in ecological research, this contribution is useful to guide choosing acoustic sensors based on their specifications. It is clear that the authors have put a lot of effort into this work and I commend their diligent work. Overall, English use is adequate, and the authors provide a sound article structure, including the data supporting their findings. Background and literature references can be improved.
Experimental design: The research question is relevant and meaningful but can be redrafted to improve how it can fill gaps in acoustic monitoring literature. Methods are overall sound, although I identified some issues in the modelling approaches that should be reviewed.
Validity of the findings: Conclusions are sound, although the results and discussion can be improved for clarity.
Additional comments: This is an interesting topic for ecologists interested in acoustic monitoring. Emerging technologies are enabling to decrease research budget by the adoption of open-source alternatives that still provide high quality recordings. I must commend the diligent work by the authors in providing this manuscript, which is an important and timely contribution. Below, I raise general and line-by-line commentaries and suggestions for the authors to improve clarity and the strengthen of this work.

Introduction
I suggest the authors to improve two main points. First, the reasoning for testing SNR regarding sampling efficiency. How can wildlife research using acoustic monitoring can benefit from such approach? Second, the goals can be redrafted for clarity.

Methods
There is some missing information regarding the experimental design that should be reviewed. The number of replicates (e.g. 2 mic replicates per level) and other sources of temporal replication (e.g. monitoring day, source of templates in automatic detection) should be disclosed. Some concerns are raised regarding the suitability of the modeling procedures, which are detailed in the line-by-line suggestions. Additionally, it would be interesting to inform the reasons for choosing these microphone sensors in light of what is used in acoustic monitoring. This source of comparison can further be addressed in the discussion.

Results
Some missing reports are: i) model inference regarding transformed vs. non transformed values for SNR, ii) results of the modelling between sound pressure level ~ distances, iii) descriptive results about the registered species (e.g. list of species). Figure legends and axis labels can be improved.

Discussion
Overall, some points can be better discussed. First, I suggest the authors to include references to stand for their statements. Second, some points can be included for a more comprehensive discussion, such as i) how does SNR specified from mics relate to SNR from actual recordings, and ii) how can other settings improve SNR? For instance, gain level, height of deployment, etc…; iii) how similar are the SNR specifications of the investigated mics from those in commercial models (e.g. audiomoth, SM models…); iv) how can your findings support the choice of mic to be used in open-source platforms, such as Arduino?
Introduction

L.43: I suggest rephrasing for “for sonant animals as birds and bats).
L. 44: Please, include “digital” after “In a”.
L. 44-45: Consider rephrasing for: “Sound waves are transduced to electric signals by microphones and then converted in digital signal that…”.
L. 47: The authors could acknowledge that microphone quality is one of many variables that influence the detection of animal sounds (e.g. habitat structure, signaling behavior, climatic conditions, sample rate, quantization, among others).
L. 48: Please, include “active microphones”, since the specification of microphone SNR won’t apply for passive microphones (e.g. dynamic ones).
L. 48: For acoustic surveys, the frequency response of microphones and the pick-up field are also important components to characterize the quality of microphones.
L. 49: Please, state that the origin of self-noise is from the mic’s circuitry.
L. 62: The authors may consider explaining in more detail what they meant with “we will focus on the more commonly mentioned signal-to-noise ratios”.
L.66: Include “microphone specifications”.
L.79: To clarify the goals, the authors may consider redrafting this excerpt to first state their aims and then how they made it. For instance, the specific goals can be described as 1) test if observed SNR is consistent with manufactures’ specifications, 2) test if detection areas is influenced by SNR, and 3) determine the sample efficiency for bats and birds using manual and automatic methods of species detection in audio recordings.
L.79: Change for “12 types of microphones”.
L. 83-86: These sentences can be relocated to the methodological section.
L.87-89: It is true that acoustic sampling area can be estimated with detection ranges of standardized sound tests. However, the sound level from the emitter is largely variable between species and even within a vocalization. For instance, consider a species with a vocalization containing larger energy levels than the ones used to infer detection ranges. Whenever such species vocalize outside the estimated detection ranges, it can still be detected by microphones given its high amplitude levels. Therefore, the direct link assumed between SNR and measures of species diversity is arguable. I suggest the authors to rephrase and to reason the potential correlative relationship between SNR and measures of species diversity.

Methods

L. 104: Please, inform the intensity used in the calibration.
L. 135: Which statistical tests do the authors refer to? Up to now, none was mentioned.
L. 143: Change ‘recorders’ for ‘microphones’.
L. 154: Please, inform the sound levels used on the tests.
L. 155: Please, inform the frequency response of the loudspeaker.
L. 157: At which amplitude levels were the ultrasonic sequences emitted?
L. 167-174: The sequence of procedures is a bit difficult to follow. I suggest the authors to provide acronyms when explaining each step on the procedure explained previously and then cite them when explaining how to calculate SNR. For instance, give an acronym to “amplification applied to the recorder” when defining it previously, and repeat it here.
L. 168: I suggest using “sensors” or “microphones” instead “recorder”. Please, check consistency through the text.
L. 175-186: The type of fitted model is missing here. Which are the predictors and response variables? Also, the authors should state which is the goal of this analysis. Perhaps the authors should consider rethinking the need to apply such inference method to pursue how distinct microphones generate distinct SNR. Specially given a high number of treatment and small observations (12 levels, 2 per level). One suggestion is to visually explore such differences simply by plotting SNR (y-axis) by mic type (x-axis) and in one color the manufacture’s level, and the other colors the observed ones. This would also provide a clearer explanation in the results.
L. 193: The authors stated previously that up 10 meters, it was measured at 2-meter intervals (L. 160).
L. 195-198: So the authors excluded distances between 30-50 meters? Please, indicate whether this was necessary to estimate the extinction distances.
L. 199: Here it is also unclear how those models were fitted. Figure S1 suggests it was one model per microphone, which I believe that would not be proper way to test if distance affect SNR and if this decay differs between microphones.
L. 202: Please, include a description in figure S2.
L. 209-210: The authors may also check model residuals using transformed vs. non-transformed SNR values to check which is better suited for linear model.
L. 220-221: For how long?
L. 231: Check if figures S3 and S2 were shifted.
L. 233: These intervals are quite large… What’s the reason for it, since the authors state that recordings were synchronized?
L. 241: Why is bat richness not relevant? Also, change according L. 241 if bat richness was not measured.
L. 242: Include “call types”.
L. 242-243: Please, describe if the total duration of tagged vocalizations is the same as calculating call duration for each detected signal (and then describe how was call duration measured). Can you also provide a reference that used the same measure to characterize vocal activity?
L. 246: Please, describe the reason to test for differences in transformed vs. non transformed values.
L. 252: Please, indicate the time interval between each step.
L. 258: Please, indicate which bat call type was used.
L. 261: Please, indicate the analysis performed in monitor to detect calls.

Results

L. 273: Check the order of supplementary figures. Figure S4 seems to be unrelated to the test. Additionally, the authors should also provide a table with competing models and coefficient estimates.
L. 274-275: Does this information refers to the observed or the manufacturer’s specification?
L. 276: How did the authors extrapolated the extinction distances? It should be detailed in the methodological section.
L. 277-278: Perhaps this information can be moved to the methodological section.
L. 280: Explain why the models fitted in figure 1 are not linear (they are curved, perhaps indicating the use of a quadratic term). Additionally, provide a table with coefficient estimates. It is still unclear how many models were fitted.
L. 280: Which effect sizes does the authors refers to?
L. 285: Which method was used to estimate marginal R-squared?
L. 286: 360 seconds?
L. 286: Same commentary as the one in L.280 about the figure and effect sizes.
L. 289: This seems to be true for the first and last graphs. On the others, there seems to be an overlap of distinct SNR in higher species richness values. Additionally, the authors may provide a table with the results of the tests and coefficients.
L. 296: Figure 4 shows many points in the graph, indicating many observations provided by external sources. This is missing in the methodological section: the number of observations (n) used in each model. Moreover, is the model shown fitted in the black or both black and red values?
L. 297: 12 microphone types?
L. 298: These false-positives are certainly related to the type of analysis used to automatically detect calls. Ideally, the authors should provide information on the accuracy of the detector itself, monitoR is the one to blame. Therefore, the authors should consider removing the “inexplicably” and provide more information on the procedures used to automatically detect species calls. Moreover, I am concerned that a large proportion of false positives may be affecting the meaning of “proportion of correct calls”.
Figure 1 and 2. Please, include “log transformed” in the x-axis label.
Figure 3. As SNR is not a continuous variable in here, it should be depicted with a categorical color palette.

Discussion

L. 307-308: The authors can discuss a bit more this assertive.
L. 309-310: Unfortunately, the reader can’t see these differences without a proper figure. For instance, does mics with higher SNR always lead to higher observed SNR?
L. 348: Acoustic signature may be not suitable to describe the characteristic of a sensor. In fact, audio sensors have different frequency responses, that should be stated in the methodological section.
L. 382: You can also adjust this with gain level adjustment.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: HIGH MICROPHONE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO ENHANCES ACOUSTIC SAMPLING OF WILDLIFE
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: Summary

This article is overall well written and presents interesting results for the field of ecoacoustic monitoring. The authors reveal that microphone SNR, which is rarely reported or considered in ecoacoustic sampling protocols, should be taken into account because it has a strong influence on sampling area around microphone and the proportion of animal vocalisations registered at one site. Quite logically, they find that the lower the signal ratio, the lower the area sampled. But having these estimations will be valuable to guide future sampling designs.

My main suggestions are mainly on the form. The methods are a bit hard to follow at times and lack crucial details, I suggest a thorough revision of the article. I have highlighted below some of the main points that were difficult to understand. I also suggest to include some of the supplementary materials back in the article to help the reader to follow along.

Introduction

An explanation of what sensitivity is and how it is measured is missing. Sensitivity appears in the methods but should be mentioned and defined earlier. Maybe to clarify the important variables (self-noise, SNR and sensitivity) and how they relate to each other, they could be defined in a dedicated box.

L56: remove ‘the’ in ‘as the 10 times’.
L57-61: this needs to be clarified. Maybe give the general formula? And give more details. Maybe switching the order of of the sentence L58 with the following two sentences could help.
L73: One thing that took me a bit of thinking is the fact that low SNR necessarily means high self noise. I thought other factors such as sensitivity of the microphone could factor in. I think that’s mainly because I hadn’t properly understood your definition of SNR when I first read it. Maybe it would be worth explaining a bit.
L75-76: isn’t that relationship obvious? Maybe you could rather emphasize that how much of an impact SNR has on signal detection in a natural setting has not much (never?) been quantified.
L79: what are the price ranges of the microphone elements tested? (I know they are discussed below) but do you know how much an assembled microphone would cost with these microphone elements? I can not believe that an assembled microphone can cost 4€.

Methods

The section call ‘sound transmission sequences’ is confusing as it aims at measuring sensitivity, SNR and detection spaces. Maybe it would help to explain the procedure for recording the sequences and then have a section for each of those three aims (or two sections but add details on how you calculate relative and absolute sensitivity and SNR).

L96: Remove ‘each of’
L99: Remove ‘of them’
L99: ‘used in commercial microphones’ what are the others used for?
L116: What does ‘pointing to the horizon’ mean? Isn’t that the same as parallel to the ground? Did you mean ‘horizontal’? At which height were they?
L121: SM2bat+ has a very particular audio plug that is usually only compatible with wildlife acoustics products. How is it possible that this was the only recorder that was compatible with all the microphones? Maybe reintroduce the supplementary materials in the methods and give more details…
L148-149: Why do you need sensitivity values? Explain.
L152: Sensitivity should have been defined before that.
L157: How long were the chirps?
L164: What is this test signal? Explain which variables you measure with it…
L172: How do you calculate self noise and SNR with this? Give more details. What was the calibrator used for?
L184: instead of ‘specified’, I suggest ‘manufacturer’ to clarify.
L185: What are these manufacturer variables?
L194-198: How do you get meter precision out of 5 meter measurements? As explaned here, it sounds like the experienced listener just eyeballed it. Maybe explain a bit more how the range was extrapolated for sensors that had ranges higher than 50 m (refer to figure S1?).
L200-202: How were the quarter ellipses drawn?
L206: Isn’t SNR already measure as a log? Why would it need to be transformed again? Technically if there’s only spreading, the relationship between SNR and detection space should be linear, shouldn’t it?
L207-209: Low/high values of what?
L225: In which software were the recordings screened?
L231: I think there is a confusion in the supplementary figure numbers: this is S4.
L258-262: It is not entirely clear what was used as a template and on which recordings were applied the detectors.

Results

I would be interested to see results about the consistency of measured SNR with this method, does it vary between manufacturers?
Why not report the self-noise measured and comment on them?
What are the relationships between sensitivity, self-noise and SNR?

L273: I don’t understand the link between the text and what I think is the figure you are referring to is S4.
L278: Could you explain the ‘terrain irregularities’?
L280-281 and L286-287: move to methods? This will avoid repetition.
L285: There were microphone elements for which there were not a single detection? That seems extreme!

Figures

Fig. 2: Which are the microphones that do not detect anything. Maybe they should be explicitly mentioned as bad for this type of application?
Fig. 4: Explain in the legend what the black line shows. Why not have two lines, one for when the template is internal vs external (black and red line).

Supplementary

Why not include more of the figures in the main text? For example the spectrograms (S4), and the estimated sampling areas (S2) as well as the figures showing measured SNR (S3 and S5)?
Are there legends for the supplementary figures?
S1: Make sure the order of the microphone is more “logical” (1, 2, 3…). And maybe use A, B, C… as in other figures. How come there isn’t 4 plots per microphone?
S2: Why are there only 12 circles? Were they averaged over each of the 2 element for each?
Figure S4: Were those the highest and lowest SNR sensors? If not, maybe show these?
Experimental design: The experimental design is appropriate but sometimes hard to follow (see Basic reporting for details). I suggest adding more details.
Validity of the findings: The findings are valid but some results that are set up in the introduction and methods (e.g. self noise) remain unreported even though they may be interesting.
Additional comments: I believe this article is a very valuable contribution to the field of ecoacoustics monitoring. Please make sure to clarify the methods.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: HIGH MICROPHONE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO ENHANCES ACOUSTIC SAMPLING OF WILDLIFE
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: I am happy to see how much the methods section (the one that deserved more attention) and the manuscript has improved from the original submission. I am sure that it will be a very interesting ms for future developement of acoustic programmes.

I have no major comments. There are 2-3 things that I would have highlighted if the paper would have been focused on the utility of sound recorders for estimating bird richness or bird abundance, but as the main goa lis to compare how some acoustic variables differ among microphones with different SNR, I truly believe in the current results. I have just a few editing comments.

L. 59: Maybe “Finally, Bardelli et al. (2019) ….
L. 72: Maybe is better to say something like: “Our mail goal was to…” We aimed to”...
L. 100: Usually numbers lower than 10 are written with letters, not sure about the recommendations of PeerJ.
L. 173: It suggests that recorders were left only one night, but it was not the case. Please, specify the concrete number of days.
L. 251. Add that reference.
References1: Add article number to Knight ms. Idem for Turgeon, this journals uses article number instead of page numbers.
References2: Also check the reference to Katz in the text, sometimes is cited as et al and others as single author.
References 3: Idem for Darras et al. 2018, since there is 2018 but not 2018 a. However, there are 2018b and 2018c (not included in the reference list).
Maybe in the discussion you could valorate the possibility of say something about how using microphones with variable SNR may have a impact in the number of species detected using ARUs (I am not providing any reference since the authors already did a meta-analysis of the topic), but also in the number of birds estimated around recorder, since the detected vocal activity rate is a common method to estimate bird densities (or abundance from recordings).
For example:
Borker, A. L., McKown, M. W., Ackerman, J. T., Eagles‐Smith, C. A., Tershy, B. R., & Croll, D. A. (2014). Vocal activity as a low cost and scalable index of seabird colony size. Conservation biology, 28: 1100-1108.
Oppel, S., Hervias, S., Oliveira, N., Pipa, T., Silva, C., Geraldes, P., Goh, M., Immler, E., & McKown, M. (2014). Estimating population size of a nocturnal burrow-nesting seabird using acoustic monitoring and habitat mapping. Nature Conservation, 7: 1-13.
Pérez‐Granados, C., Bota, G., Giralt, D., Barrero, A., Gómez‐Catasús, J., Bustillo‐De la Rosa, D., & Traba, J. (2019). Vocal Activity Rate index: a useful method to infer terrestrial bird abundance with acoustic monitoring. Ibis, 161(4): 901-907.

Acknowledgements:
I think that it is worthy to thank the reviewers, since more or less they improved (at least a little) the ms. ;)
Experimental design: The methods section has been clearly improved, and even the most confusing section of the original version (to me), the one related to the external detection template, has been modified following a more common method, such as the estimation of the precision and the recall rate. By the way, please check the Knight et al. ms again and valorate if the term recall rate is more adequate, at least for me it is the adequate term (rather than recall).
Validity of the findings: Nothing to add. The impact, conclusions and data were already clear in the original submission, and have been even improved with the new R code and new analyses.
Additional comments: Thanks for your final words, and more importantly, for your work.

Cristian Pérez-Granados.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: HIGH MICROPHONE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO ENHANCES ACOUSTIC SAMPLING OF WILDLIFE
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: I have read the previous and the revised version of this manuscript, and I believe that most of the points raised by this reviewer were satisfactorily addressed. I think this is a much-improved manuscript that will be very helpful for the readers interested in ecoacoustics and acoustic monitoring in general, and I commend the authors for their diligent work.
I have raised some few concerns in this revised version of the manuscript. Some are related to few points that haven’t changed from the previous version. I truly respect the decision by the authors, but in my viewpoint, some minor adjustments would improve the understanding of this important work.
Particularly, the additional concerns raised in this review regard to some procedures in the statistical analyses, which I detail below. Additionally, some of the missing information in the main text were justified to be in a report (markdown file) from the supplementary material. I do applaud the authors for sharing the code and preparing the report, but I believe that this is rather an auxiliary material that do not substitute synthesized results in the form of tables. Therefore, I still recommend the authors to include some main information in the text and to provide tables with results summaries.

Abstract/results,
•	Change “from worst to the best” for “from the lower to higher SNR”.  Judging what’s worst or best should be left for the reader.

Introduction
•	L. 42: “…microphone quality is essential as it is a controllable technical parameter…”.
Although I understand the message here, I believe the microphone quality is fixed rather than controllable, particularly if by microphone quality you mean the self-noise, as stated on the next sentence.
Things that can be controlled are the technical settings and recording techniques in the field. And last but not least, when customizing recording systems, the choice of microphone is controllable as well. That being said, I suggest the authors to first define what they mean by microphone quality, and then justify that the self-noise can affect sound detections.

Methods
•	Measured vs. specified signal-to-noise (L. 209)
I am unsure if glm is the most appropriate method to test the association between these variables, since there is no clear directional cause in here, but rather, a correlational one. However, I do like the idea of including the manufacturer in the model, although I think they should not be in the form of interaction (*). To complement these analyses, the authors could additionally include a correlation test among the variables.
•	For model inference with AIC, the authors should also include a null model so we can check if the relationship is different from that expected by chance alone. This model is built as a function of intercept (e.g. null.model <- lm(response ~1)). Additionally, I recommend to also provide the differences between AIC of the best model and each AIC (i.e. ΔAICi, which can be computed with ICtab() in bbmle package).

•	L. 199: As suggested in the previous revision, I believe that the type of automatic detections made in monitoR should be disclosed here, and the authors can add that details can be found in the supplementary material.

•	Although we are all sure that SNR will affect somehow detection space area, vocalization activity, species richness, and automatic detector performance, other mics’ specifications could also potentially act as confounding effects. Specifically, many potential confounding effects could be summarized by attributing the effect of being from different manufacturers.
However, I believe the number of observations is low to properly include manufacturer as random effects in the models. Therefore, a solution could be to build models including manufacturer as covariates and then confront the different models (e.g. using AICc).

Results
•	As required in the previous revision, the authors should describe their results using tables containing the predictor variables, weighted AIC, degrees of freedom, etc.

•	In figure 3, the values for birds were predicted from a model using log(SNR). Shouldn’t the values be subject to exp(), just as it was done with bats?

•	I understand that SNR is a continuous variable. Let me rephrase the suggestion, which is just a way to “read” more easily the figure and rapidly understand what it means. The observed SNR values range between 20 to 80 (1kHz). The color scale used is an even distribution of gray levels. However, SNR values observed they are not evenly distributed along the range of these values. Specifically, differences between close values of SNR are nearly impossible to distinguish with the color gradient used. Therefore, the authors could use a color gradient that emphasizes such minor differences between the aggregated values.
Experimental design: No comment.
Validity of the findings: No comment.
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: HIGH MICROPHONE SIGNAL-TO-NOISE RATIO ENHANCES ACOUSTIC SAMPLING OF WILDLIFE
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors have significantly improved the manuscript according to all the reviewers and editor’s comments.
Experimental design: The experimental design is adequate considering the questions addressed.
Validity of the findings: The findings are clearly support by results and now better explained.
Additional comments: The findings are clearly support by results and now better explained.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: INSECT POLLINATION IS IMPORTANT IN A SMALLHOLDER BEAN FARMING SYSTEM
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The paper is clear, well written in professional English and structured according to PeerJ standards. Appropriate literature had been cited with no major omissions and no superfluous or inappropriate citations. The figures are relevant and of good quality although I have some comments on the labels (see general comments)

The research addresses differences in yield of Phaseolus vulgaris L (common bean) by employing three treatments: open pollination, hand pollination and self-pollination, using standard methods that have been widely published. This experimental approach was augmented with transects that recorded flower visiting insect presence together with a mark and recapture study that investigated the extent to which pollinating insects observed in the crop were using local semi-natural habitats in field margins.  Combining these results the authors drew the following conclusions: insect pollination increases been yield; that this is important because it has a beneficial economic impact for small-holder farmers; that insects that pollinate the crops also use the margins, that margins could thereby be important in supporting pollination in the bean crop studied; that although the authors found no pollinator limitation, the potential for limitation is a risk for small-holder farmers and that, by extension, the provision of non-crop habitat could increase security for  farmers. The authors carried out the study along an altitudinal gradient, at three different altitudes and found the treatment effects consistent across altitude. This topic fits within the scope of PeerJ being a Research Article in the field of Environmental Science.  The research gap was clearly defined.
Experimental design: The experiment was well designed and described. The results were credible. The authors carefully and clearly linked the results to the original research question and the implications of the findings clearly are described in the context of the evidence base.

The field study permit is in order.
Validity of the findings: As I said above I can’t download the data so I am afraid I will have to ask the Academic editor to check it unless there is another way for me to access it.

The authors have acknowledged the gaps that are in their research and presented negative results where they found them. The replication is sufficient (see my notes in general comments).
Additional comments: Overall I really liked (and enjoyed) this paper, apart from the minor points below, it is very clear and delivers fundamental information that's useful, in a concise and readable article.

I have some small notes that I would like to share with the authors:

Line 34 – It would be useful to have the yield linked to area unit (ha) in the abstract as that makes it immediately clear for the reader.  It might also be good to see the estimated economic benefit specified but that's not essential.

Line 111 – It surprises me that there is no difference in soil fertility with altitude, especially in the light of different natural vegetation. How was this determined, were there soil tests? Could you add this, or say how you decided that this was so?

Lines 124 -132 I find the replication a little confusing.  As I understand it you have:

3 x altitudes
4 x blocks (you call them plots of 9m x 16m, maybe they should be called blocks)
Within each block each treatment was applied once – in plots of 4m2 with 4 beans each
So you have 4 x 4 = 16 bean plants per treatment at each elevation and a total n of 48.
Is that correct?  It would be really helpful to have n stated.
Later (Line 157) you say 12 sites for the three elevation zones –maybe this could be brought up earlier and the experimental design slightly clarified, I think you have 4 replicates of each ‘treatment’ at each elevation - each replicate based on four plants which presumably you averaged for analysis.  Sorry to labour this point!

Line 134 – you do not state was ‘raw’ means – it might not be clear for the lay reader as ‘raw’ self-pollination is not mentioned again –being referred to thereafter just as self-pollination.

Line 166 - Did you identify any of the plants in the margins? It would be interesting for the reader to know something about the composition of the margins if you have it.

Line 194 - It would be helpful to have the information about when the net bags were removed earlier in the methods – this was a question that I queried as I was reading.

Line 204 – insert an ‘a’ in the first line so that it reads ‘ …any insect that interacted with a flower …’

Line 228 – I think here it would be better to say that you tested for correlation (and how) in the methods, and then in results give the results of the correlation (plus statistics). The details of the MANOVA and ANOVA are a little sketchy, stating the model you used would be useful (you say across the zones, how was altitude included in the analysis?) and how was field margin included in the ANOVA? Were any of the data transformed before analysis? Did you test for normality? These details would be really useful and would be reassuring.

Line 266  - With reference to the presence of Apis mellifera and the increase in abundance in the mid-zone – presumably this is due to more beekeeping going on in this area, if you have any information to shed light on this, it would add context.

Line 279 – replace ‘particularly apparent’ with ‘clear’
Line 297 – remove ‘at all’

Discussion:  This lightly raises the issue of nectar robbing, I don’t want to open a large can of worms here for the authors but if you see any potential to address this a little more deeply it would be interesting. The authors found that A. mellifera marked with dye in the margin were found in the crop,  yet A. mellifera would not be expected to a good pollinator in beans because they are short-tongued – in the UK we have observed that honey bees do visit beans, but that they usually use holes cut by Bombus species to rob. This isn’t a big issue, but it raises a question about how meaningful the incidence of honey bees is in this paper.

Comments on Figure labels
Fig. 1. Bean yield parameters, mean (±SE) number of pods, number of seeds and weight of 30
seeds for each treatment.

The treatments are: open-pollination (open), hand-pollination (hand) and self-pollination
(self). The error bars on top of the means measure the Least Significant Difference (LSD).
Pollination treatments are considered significantly different if the error bars do not overlap (p≤ 0.05).

This is a little misleading, the significance was determined by a statistical test – the use of error bars demonstrates the differences, but this is not how the statistical differences were determined (as suggested by the label) – for completeness the statistics (n, F, p, df) could be added, either as an annotation in the figure, or in the figure label.

Figure 2
The proportion of dye-marked insects by functional group collected during fluorescent dye
experiment in bean agri-systems.

The location of the experiment could be stated, rather than the generic ‘bean agri-systems’ that is used.

Figure 3
The effects of field margin position on numbers of flower visitors in bean field. The field
margin here is indicated as 0 m.

The label does not explain what the small letters indicate, this should be done and the statistics could be included so that the figure can be interpreted without reading the text.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: INSECT POLLINATION IS IMPORTANT IN A SMALLHOLDER BEAN FARMING SYSTEM
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Text is generally clear and unambiguous. See line-by-line comments for some areas where clarity could be improved. A main point you need to be clearer on is how you moved from the yield parameters that you measured (pod per plant, seed per pod, mass of 30 seeds) to yield in kg/ha.

I think you need to include more references specifically related to Phaseolous vulgaris pollination - you were perhaps overly reliant on referring to the literature on Vicia faba which is a different species with a different floral structure. From a brief literature search, I found quite a lot of literature on P vulgaris pollination and pollinators, there is scope to include a lot of that literature here.

The figures and tables should be clearer about what error bars are presented. I suggest you also need to include some measure of variability in table 1. It would aid transparency to include your raw data (or a link to where this can be accessed). You should include more mention of effect sizes in the results text.
Experimental design: Research questions are well defined and meaningful. The investigation appears to have been rigorous and conducted to a high standard. The methods are generally described with enough detail for them to be replicated, see the line-by-line comments for areas where more details or clarification is required.
Validity of the findings: The data on which the conclusions are based don't seem to have been made available in a repository.

There are some parts of the discussion section that need to be improved and are a bit tenuous. I specify these in the line-by-line comments. Generally I think more should be made of the comparison between bagged plant treatments (hand pollinated or selfed) as this is the properly controlled comparison.
Additional comments: This was a well thought out study that helps to address knowledge gaps around the value of pollination services in East Africa and associated agronomic management in smallerholder farming systems. It is an interesting and generally well written paper. Below I list suggested changes required to make the article suitable for publication.

Line by line comments
First page – ‘field margins’ not ‘field margin’. The third sentence in your methods section is describing results.
25 – specify this is common bean. I think this statement is incorrect and there is already evidence about the effect of insect pollination on Phaseolous vulgaris yield. For example, see https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0204460, https://doi.org/10.1080/00218839.1966.11100139, https://doi.org/10.32861/10.32861/jac.411.105.111
27 – change ‘margin’ to ‘margins’. Have you actually tested the importance of margins as a refuge, or have you tested whether margins increase provision of pollination service?
28-31 – this text is results not methods and should be moved accordingly – or delete and replace with text explaining your different treatments and introducing what the marking study involved.
32-35 - I think it would be valuable to mention your hand pollination treatment here too as this is the properly controlled comparison – your difference between open pollinated and excluded plants may be confounded with an effect of bagging.
52-54 – insect pollinators can also stimulate self pollination
58-59 – reference needed for this first point that agriculture intensification has resulted in large scale losses of poll abundance and diversity. Perhaps reflect that this is a complicated process and several factors have contributed to pollinator losses.
71 – be clearer what you mean by ‘and their support’ – it is support of pollinators, not of pollinator declines?
74-75 – it’d be more effective to include a ref about changes in agri environment in Africa here to link to your previous sentence
91 – I suggest autogamous should be removed here. Faba bean is partially autogamous.
93 – see comment above about some different studies that have tested P vulgaris pollinator dependence in a range of environments
109 – clarify how many sites there were in total and how many per elevation zone (e.g. like on lines 170-172)
124 – how widespread is Kariasii, approx. what percentage of growers use it? (how representative is this variety of beans in the surrounding landscape) Plant genotype can be very important in terms of reliance on pollination.
125-126 – were these experimental plots at one site, or distributed across different farmer’s land within each elevation zone?
139 – I think it is an oversimplification to say no micro-climate effects have been reported. Free 1993 (Insect pollination of crops book) discusses this in some detail. See doi:10.1093/jxb/erw430 table 2 for a test of bagging effects. Alternatively, your bagging treatment could also be excluding important pest species.
160-166 – Rewrite this to clarify that the transect was from the margin to 50m into the field, not just along the field margin.
170-172 – were these the same sites as the exclusion experiment?
185 – change ‘during which’ to ‘and’
188-190 – You could reflect in the discussion that this measurement therefore represents the maximum potential interaction between flower visitors and the crop.
197-198 – how did you convert from yield data to kg/ha? So you measured weight of 30 representative dry seeds, not the total seed mass per plant or per unit area. If the pollinated plants produced a greater number of seeds in total, and those seeds were heavier, did you account for both of these factors in your yield conversion?
242-243 – change wording, were all stats analyses done in both statistical software?
245-257 – in the results section it would be very useful to state effect sizes – how big were the differences between these pollination treatments? What were the significant differences among zones?
251-253 – perhaps the more important comparison here is between the hand-pollination and self-pollination treatments as these control for the effect of bagging, the difference between hand pollination and open is less interesting in the context of pollination dependence due to confounding effects of the bags.
280 – include comparison hand-pollination vs self-pollination here
282-284 – this is discussion text. This could indicate that there is no pollination deficit, but could alternatively indicate that your hand pollination treatment is not as effective as insects, or that bagging negatively impacted on plant growth
297 – should this be ‘of all’ not ‘at all’?
303 – additional description of the results here would be useful – how far in to the field did the insects travel? You could move some of the description (presentation of results) from the discussion section (e.g. lines 390-400) to here.
310-311 – this is an interesting discussion point – it would useful to clarify here how many bean crops the farmers can typically produce per year
324 – suggest you remove mention of quality if not measured here. Increase in total weight does not indicate seed quality – there could just be more seeds (and these could even be smaller)
325-328 – P vulgaris is a different species to faba bean, I think you should try to avoid so many comparisons to faba bean and instead include more literature about common bean pollination dependence. What are the modest benefits that Free 1966 recorded? See some refs as examples in the comment above.
332 – if honeybees are the most frequently sampled insects, how does this change your management recommendations?
337-341– Marzinzig et al 2018 relates to faba bean which has a different floral structure – switch to a reference about nectar robbing of P vulgaris flowers. Regarding the second part of this sentence, frequency of robbing vs pollination visits, the Marzinzig et al 2018 study that you cite in the same sentence found 47.4% of visits were robbing compared to only 28.6% pollination.
348 – I don’t agree with this - inbreeding depression would likely act on the offspring (and yield in subsequent generations if those seeds were planted) rather than current generation productivity. If you want to expand on this argument I think you need to include some refs specifically about retention of selfed vs outcrossed pods (there is some limited evidence in faba bean). This looks like it might be an interesting ref for P vulgaris - DOI: 10.2307/2444124
350-352 – include specific refs regarding P vulgaris rather than referring to leguminous flowers in general
353 – you say that pod per plant and beans per pod were not affected between hand pollination and open, but seed mass was, this suggests that fertilization was adequate in the hand pollination treatment but that the bagging reduced plant resource availability and ability to mature the seeds compared to open plants. (looking now at figure 1, it looks like in fact the difference between hand and open across these different yield metrics is quite similar).
363-368 – this viability of hand pollination by growers discussion is quite a stretch and should be removed – you just discussed on line 354 that differences may be due to bagging effect and not the pollination event itself
373-384 – you didn’t measure non-pollinating species / pest species but it would be useful to include a ref about it here, whether this vegetation in field margins can increase pest density in the crop
398 – clarify what percentages refer to here, I assume it is % of total insect number measured across all distances?
416 – doesn’t this contradict the Woodcock et al 2016 study you cite on line 401 also regarding oilseed rape? How do these bits of information fit together?
464-466 – good to include this, cultivar is likely to be highly important. You could change cross-pollination to ‘pollination’ – insect visits can increase both self and cross pollination.
Table 1 – For transparency you should include standard deviation or standard error in the yield measurement, and then show how this translates to uncertainty in your % yield increase and economic estimate.
Figure 1 – if you did the Tukey HSD tests it would be clearer to show what was significantly different by using letters above the bars to distinguish the significantly different groups – like you do in figure 3. Clarify in figure legend whether error bars show SE or LSD.
Figure 3 – explain what the error bars show there.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: INSECT POLLINATION IS IMPORTANT IN A SMALLHOLDER BEAN FARMING SYSTEM
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: This is a second review after corrections. The majority of my comments stand, therefore I am only commenting on the changes that have been made.
Experimental design: No comment.
Validity of the findings: No comment.
Additional comments: Thank you for addressing the minor comments in my previous review. The manuscript is now ready for publication and this paper makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of pollination in smallholder systems. Congratulations to all the authors.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: INSECT POLLINATION IS IMPORTANT IN A SMALLHOLDER BEAN FARMING SYSTEM
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: The article has been improved following the revisions made by the authors following the first round of review. The authors added some useful references to literature about Phaseolous vulgaris pollination and clarified differences between P vulgaris and V faba literature. There are just a few very small changes required.

Raw data does not appear to have been shared - is this a requirement of peerj?
The figure legends state that the error bars are both SE and LSD - please change the legends and clarify which is reported.
Figure 2 y axis label - is this proportion, or is it the number of insects?
Experimental design: Methods around how the yield in kg/ha was calculated are still not clear. This is important because this is the result that the authors report in the abstract. It doesn't appear that the authors measured the total yield mass per plant, only on 30 representative seeds from each plot. I imagine that the authors calculated an average mass per seed from these 30 representative ones, multiplied this by average seeds per pod, then multiplied this by average pods per plant, then by plants per ha - it would be would be useful if the authors included the actual calculation formula used in an appendix.
The authors confirmed in response to reviewers that the field sites were the same for the observation transects and the bagging experiments, but this needs to be written in the paper.
The number of replicates is a bit confusing still, please could the authors use consistent terminology (I think the main to clarify, is whether a plot is the same as a site? If so it would be useful to use only one of these terms). Similarly "four bean plants grown in a block size of 4 m2 and there were four replications per treatment" - are these 4 plants the 4 replicates, or are there 4 replicates of 4 plants (16 per block of each treatment)? If the authors could state the total number of manipulated plants across the whole study within the paper methods section, this would reduce the ambiguity.
Otherwise the methodological details are clearly written and the research is reproducible.
Validity of the findings: No additional comment but see section 2 comments as this applies here too.
Additional comments: The paper is improved now and I enjoyed reading the revised version, thank you.

I spotted a couple of typos -
337 recorded not recoded
352 polliantors not pollinators

357-358 - just to clarify, why would presence of long tongued carpenter bees increase the presence of honeybees? As you say, is the short tongued bee species that typically rob first (e.g. B terrestris) and facilitate secondary robbing by honeybees.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ISOLATION AND EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSES OF PORCINE EPIDEMIC DIARRHEA VIRUS IN ASIA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors have adhered to the journal's basic reporting guidelines.
Experimental design: No comment
Validity of the findings: No comment
Additional comments: The paper describes the isolation and characterization of a virulent strain of PEDV from a pig farm in China. The paper is well structured and the methods are detailed and reproducible enough. The have reported a distinct strain of PEDV different from the vaccine strain with mutations in the S protein which may be responsible for incomplete protection from the vaccine strain. The paper is well written but there are some typographical errors that should be looked into and corrected.
.
SPECIFIC COMMENTS: Abstract line 25, the authors school recast the phrase as thus. In this study we the genetic characteristics of PEDV in Asia. The phylogenetic should be deleted, phylogeny is also a part of genetic analysis in this context.
Also one isolate reported from just one farm is insufficient for the strong conclusions drawn and should be included as a limitation in the study.
Figure legend 1 line 472 (B) The legend does not correspond with the figure, the legend states that Sequence alignment on the complete genomes of PEDV strains HB2018 and CV777. While the figure is a similarity plot of the two PEDV strains illustrated on SimPlot. The authors are advised to make the appropriate correction.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ISOLATION AND EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSES OF PORCINE EPIDEMIC DIARRHEA VIRUS IN ASIA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Dear editor

The paper by Liang et al brings a new PEDV genome recently isolated in China. I think it is an interesting study which uses phylogenetic analysis to call attention to the possible inefficiency of the current PEDV vaccine against viruses from other “genogroups”.

Overall, my major criticism is over the phylogenetic methods chosen by the authors. While I think that the distinction between strains HB2018 and CV777 (the “vaccine strain”) is clear enough to appear whichever method was used, there are several issues (see below) concerning the phylogenetic methods chosen by the authors.

These concerns are easy to tackle and only require more data analysis.

Major issues

- Phylogenetic analysis

1) I'm very concerned about the phylogenetic analysis performed here. NJ is a "quick and dirty" heuristic that usually recovers the minimum evolution tree. However, distance-based methods are usually worse than character-based methods (such as ML - or Bayesian methods, which also rely on a likelihood function). Based on the current dataset, this NJ tree is also hard to root. Two non-mutually exclusive alternatives would be a) include an outgroup, such as another related alphacoronaviridae, or b) use a molecular-clock method based on sample dates (such as Beast), which will generate a rooted tree. There is also no information about the genetic distance used and a justification for that (note that even in MEGA X there is a module to compare the fit of different evolutionary nucleotide models). Simple genetic distances such as F84, JC, K2P may be unable to account for multiple hits in the alignment, which may have profound impacts on tree topology. I do not question that HB2018 and CV777 do belong to different genotypes, neither that the low effectiveness of the PEDV vaccine has to do with this issue. However, I strongly suggest that that the authors reanalyze their data using a more rigorous phylogenetic framework.

2) Why does the tree in Figure 1 have so few terminals? How were the 207 sequences filtered out? Does DR13 belong to any "genogroup"?

3) What is the point of Figure 1C? Do the authors believe that S protein has a different underlying tree than the rest of the genome? If so, which process would have caused this? Recombination? Or is it just an artifact of a higher mutation rate which increases phylogenetic "noise" in the region? Or is it just noise due to the lower absolute number of mutations available for phylogeny estimation? How is it possible to discriminate among these alternatives?

4) Similarly, in Figure 2, there is no information about the ML methodology in the Material and Methods, no justification for the use of JC model, and no justification for the rooting position. Note that several genotypes are not clades. While this can be a real phenomenon, a poorly reconstructed phylogeny can also play a role in this.

5) Are "genogroup" assignments a result from this study, or was the phylogenetic structure in PEDV known? This could be given in Table S1. On the other hand, if it is an original result, how it was performed, given that genogroups are not clades in the phylogenetic tree? It is important to clarify this issue.

- Other

6) Please be aware of the use of "homology" when discussing "identity". Homology is a qualitative term that refers (in this case) to the origin of a given genome position. The position is homologous irrespective of the nucleotide present in two given sequences. Newly inserted positions may lack a homologous equivalent (though the ORF itself is homologous), but this is not what is being computed. Also avoid referring to "homology" in lines 152 and 154.

7) I wonder if modelling the 3D structure of the S protein and understanding its topology and polarity may give other insights about the effectiveness of a general vaccine against PEDV.

8) Overall, I think that the discussion part of the "results and discussion" section could be shortened, as some ideas are repeated several times (such as the inference that the CV777-based vaccine is ineffective against GII strains).

9) Most of sections "Analysis of the S protein" and "Analysis of the ORF3-E-M-N proteins" is only descriptive. There are some interesting insights, but they get lost amidst idiosyncratic substitutions of uncertain biological meaning. I suggest the authors to rephrase this section trying to resume and discuss only the most important results. The complete list of list of mutations can be given as a supplementary material.

Minor issues

line 52. substitute "China in 2010" for "China since 2010"
line 54. I'm no native English speaker, but the use of "nor" in this sentence sounds weird to me. I'd replace it by "and"
line 61. "...and determined its complete genome sequence"
line 63. I'd substitute this sentence, which is quite vague, by a more formal description of the study objectives
line 116. remove "of"
line 118. Are these complete genomes?
line 157. I see no reason to give the full list of S changes in the text
line 185. I find this sentence a little bit misleading. Please note that "ALL" isolates <2008 included in the analyses are only 5 isolates.
line 202. substitute "strains" by "strain"
line 204. Please rephrase this sentence
line 285. What is "relatively highly"?

Figures have low resolution and are hard to read (at least in the proof pdf)
Experimental design: no comment (see basic reporting)
Validity of the findings: no comment (see basic reporting)
Additional comments: no comment (see basic reporting)


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ISOLATION AND EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSES OF PORCINE EPIDEMIC DIARRHEA VIRUS IN ASIA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: The manuscript describes the results of PEDV HB2018 genome comparative analysis. The PEDV HB2018 has been isolated and sequenced, and the evolutionary relationships with PEDV strains have been investigated.  The results are of interest but should be improved by additional analysis or data.
Experimental design: The PEDV HB2018 phylogenetic, statistical and evolutionary analysis has been done with widely used software and algorithms. However, taking into account a number of analyzed sequences some additional investigations should've been performed ( e.g. recombination analysis, pairwise matrix, minority variants, dN/dS, positive selection sites, etc).  I believe that the genetic analysis of one viral sequence is no longer acceptable as an original article.
Validity of the findings: The number of figures should be minimized and the quality improved. For instance, in Figure 2, it is almost impossible to see the name of the PEDV strains on the circular tree. The authors also should refrain from using print screens as figures.
The authors argue that the mutations in PEDV HB2018 strain may affect the antigenicity, pathogenicity, and neutralization properties of the variant strains, however, no results confirming this proposition are presented. The results of the virus neutralization test or comparative growing curve will definitely benefit the study.
Additional comments: The authors present the genetic analysis of novel PEDV HB2018 strain, which is important for animal coronavirus research, but I would recommend to reconsider the manuscript as a short communication or a brief report.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ISOLATION AND EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSES OF PORCINE EPIDEMIC DIARRHEA VIRUS IN ASIA
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors have adhered to the journals reporting format and the paper is well structured. I have no comment.
Experimental design: No comment
Validity of the findings: No further comment
Additional comments: The article is well written the authors have satisfied all my concerns, no further comment


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ISOLATION AND EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSES OF PORCINE EPIDEMIC DIARRHEA VIRUS IN ASIA
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Dear editor

Thank you for the opportunity to evaluate the new version of Liang et al manuscript. Overall, I think that the authors did a great job in the revision and that this I a much improved version of the study.

However, I have two brief considerations to make:
Experimental design: 1) It is still not clear why did the authors use the TN93 model. I assume that they used the “model selection” module of MegaX, mas this should be stated explicitly, as well as the criteria for choosing this model (BIC, AICc, etc).
Validity of the findings: 2) I didn’t like the splitting between Results and Discussion in the new version. First, I think that there is a lot of discussion going on in the Results section (I think that whenever you put your results in context considering the literature you are “discussing” them). Second, I think that combining results and discussion improved readability, without the problems of repeating ideas in both sections.
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: ISOLATION AND EVOLUTIONARY ANALYSES OF PORCINE EPIDEMIC DIARRHEA VIRUS IN ASIA
Review round: 3
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Dear editor/authors

Even though I think that the main conclusions of the paper are robust to phylogenetic model choice, I don't buy the explanation that it is ok to use a given model because others have use it before. Model selection in Mega X takes less than 5 minutes to run, and would give the authors a better justification for their selected model. GTR is also a widely used model. Gamma correction for site heterogeneity is also widely used. Because a given model is adequate for other datasets, it doesn't mean it is adequate for THIS dataset, and that's why model selection should be used in phylogenetic studies.

There are other, much more complex issues concerning model selection, which I don't think are relevant here. However, I still believe that a minimal justification is needed. MEGA X provides a relatively easy way of doing this. However, I leave the final decision for the editor as I don't think this impacts the conclusions of the study.

Your sincerely
Experimental design: no comment
Validity of the findings: no comment
Additional comments: No additional comments


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: POLARITY AND EPITHELIAL-MESENCHYMAL TRANSITION OF RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIAL CELLS IN PROLIFERATIVE VITREORETINOPATHY
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: This manuscript by Zou and colleagues covers the topic of epithelial mesenchymal transition (EMT) in relation to a ocular fibrotic complication termed proliferative vitreoretinopathy. The main targeted audience is, therefore, people interested in ocular fibrosis. However, as EMT plays a key role in other fibrotic complications as well as in cancer metastasis, the manuscript may have some cross-disciplinary interest.
While there are a fair amount of overlap with past reviews on the topic, the manuscript also describes recent studies that have been published in the last three years.
The Introduction does clearly summarize the subject area, current problems, and the motivation.
Experimental design: The review is organized into subsections but could be better organized into coherent paragraphs in order to avoid jumping around and remove unnecessary repetitions.
Validity of the findings: The authors claims that they have reviewed “emphasizing key insights into potential approaches to prevent PVR” (from the abstract). However, I was not sure which part actually emphasized key insights.
The manuscript conclude with the need for more research on mechanisms involved in PVR, and does not necessarily identify gaps or future directions.
Additional comments: The vast number of cited references clearly demonstrate that the authors covered many articles. While the authors have covered many relevant studies, it becomes a little hard to follow due to the following reasons.
(1) The written English in certain places make it harder to follow. Improvement of the English language will significantly enhance the readability of the manuscript and ensures that the audience clearly understand your text. Improvement in the use of commas, in particular, will be beneficial.
Repeated typos: “RPE cells EMT” should be “RPE cell EMT”
Other typos: extracelluar (line 128), Samd (should be Smad, Fig2)
Suggested change to use of “release (line 121)”, “therefore (line 124)”, “transmit (line 128)”, “through (line 274)”
Consider rewriting sentence: Line 226 (;they change ~)
(2) Description of studies using RPE and other cell types are often intermingled without clarification. Furthermore, studies that has been conducted on the human RPE cell line ARPE-19, which never becomes truly polarized, is often treated as RPE cells within the manuscript. It will be very helpful if the authors distinguish between non-RPE, RPE and ARPE-19.

Section 3. RPE and Fibrocellular Membrane – please clarify between “differentiated RPE” and “de-differentiated RPE (EMT-RPE)” as the “RPE” that contributes to PVR membrane formation is the EMT-RPE.

Minor comments
Not sure if Line155-165 is necessary as it does not seem to have relevance to EMT or PVR.
Line 261-262 – explain the function of cofilin and how it is regulated by phosphorylation.
Line 295-303 reads like an add-on after writing the manuscript. It will be great if it can be incorporated into the section above.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: POLARITY AND EPITHELIAL-MESENCHYMAL TRANSITION OF RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIAL CELLS IN PROLIFERATIVE VITREORETINOPATHY
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: The review is within the scope of the journal.

there are numbers of reviews that are similar to the current review, however, previous review did not make a clear connection of the RPE Polarity to EMT.

The Introduction of the review is adequate.
Experimental design: It is a comprehensive review, it covered most of the information in the field.

The uncovered information, not cited reference and the suggestion for the review organization are listed in the following  section of General comments for the author.
Validity of the findings: General speaking, the review is  well developed and supported argument that meets the goals set out in the Introduction.

The conclusion did not include the contents of  unresolved questions / gaps.
Additional comments: This is an interesting review paper; The authors summarized some of previous publications in the study of the role of RPE EMT in the pathogenesis of PVR. the diagrams look nice.
   Following questions should be addressed before the consideration of the paper to be published in the journal.
Major points:
1.	Lack of the information of Clinical evidence of RPR EMT in the pathogenesis of PVR
2.	the authors mentioned the Polarity of RPE, what are the characteristics of RPE Polarity physiologically and what is the phenotypes changes in the condition of EMT? In factor, the authors put the RPE Polarity in the remarkable position, however, there is not much description of the relevance of RPE Polarity to EMT, in order to make its title consistence with contents, the review should be reconstructed and extended.
3.	the role of Epigenetic factors in the contribution of RPE EMT has not been incorporated into the review paper.
4.	Review is not only a pile up of previous publications but also your view and comments should be included. In the section of conclusion, the authors should   incorporate what are the unsolved question in the field and what is the speculation.

Minor:

1.	There are 3 types of EMT, in the current review which type EMT refers to?
2.	What are the markers in RPE cells when EMT occurs; in the condition of EMT, which molecular markers are obtained and which lost?
3.	Interruption of junction of RPE is a critical step in the induction of EMT, there are some key publications about this; among the previous study, HGF has been shown to play an important role in the interruption of RPE junction, treatment of RPE explants with HGF results in rapid disassembly of tight and adherens junctions associated with loss or redistribution of junctional proteins, decreased TER, and increased migration of RPE cells from the monolayer (Jin et al. IOVS, August 2002, Vol. 43, No. 8,2782-2790; Invest Ophthalmol Vis Sci. 2004;45:323–329). Those informative message has been neglected
4.	there are much more transcription factors involved in the induction of EMT, the authors need to look up previous publication closely.
5.	line 304, RNA and EMT, it should be miRNA not RNA
6.	It may be better to put section 3 “ RPE and Fibrocellular Membrane” in the second place.
7.	no information about the intervention of RPE EMT.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: POLARITY AND EPITHELIAL-MESENCHYMAL TRANSITION OF RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIAL CELLS IN PROLIFERATIVE VITREORETINOPATHY
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: There are many reviews about RPE cell EMT and PVR, but previous reviews did not pay much attention to the relationship between RPE polarity and EMT. So I think it’s reasonable for this review to be published in the journal after revision, the review is within the scope of the journal. The introduction does adequately introduce the subject.
Experimental design: This is a review manuscript which content is within the Aims and Scope of the journal. The survey methodology is consistent with a comprehensive, unbiased coverage of the subject. But I think there is logical problem in this review manuscript. And not all sources were adequately cited.
Validity of the findings: The review is a well developed and supported argument that meets the goals set out in the Introduction. But the conclusion doesn’t include the contents of unresolved questions / gaps/ future directions.
Additional comments: To be frank, this is an interesting review manuscript. Although there are many reviews about RPE cell EMT and PVR, but previous reviews did not pay much attention to the relationship between RPE polarity and EMT. But there still has some questions, the following questions should be addressed before the manuscript to be fully considered to be published in the journal.

Major points:
1.	The title include the polarity of RPE cell, it’s the main difference from previous review about EMT and PVR, but what is polarity of RPE, and what’s the change once EMT occurs, what’s the real relationship between the polarity of RPE cell and EMT in PVR, all this questions were not answered clearly. The author should adding a new part about RPE polarity and EMT.
2. The manuscript mentioned the relationship between lncRNA and EMT, is it necessary in this manuscript, if it’s necessary, why not adding other epigenetic factors in this manuscript?
3. In the conclusion, the authors should mention what are the unsolved questions in the field and what is the future direction.

Minor points:
1.	There are some new papers about EMT and RPE cells, which also summarized the EMT of RPE cells and transcription factors of EMT, the authors should find new reference from recent publication.
2.	The logical structure should be adjusted, I think it would be better to change the place of part2 (RPE and EMT) and part 3 (RPE and Fibrocellular Membrane).
3.	As we all known that there are 3 types of EMT, the authors should mention that which kind of EMT happens in PVR in this manuscript.
4. The figures looks good, but there are some spelling mistakes, such as in Figure 2, Samd2/3 should be replaced with Smad2/3, Samd4 should be replaced with Smad4.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: POLARITY AND EPITHELIAL-MESENCHYMAL TRANSITION OF RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIAL CELLS IN PROLIFERATIVE VITREORETINOPATHY
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: no comment
Experimental design: no comment
Validity of the findings: no comment
Additional comments: The authors answered all questions raised by reviewers, the manuscript was improved a lot.
however, There is one concept which need to be corrected, in line 296, the authors mentioned  “Unlike transcription factors, epigenetic modifications are more stable/long-term”.  the statement is not right；in fact, Epigenetic modifications are highly dynamic process in developmental biology and pathogenesis of diseases.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: POLARITY AND EPITHELIAL-MESENCHYMAL TRANSITION OF RETINAL PIGMENT EPITHELIAL CELLS IN PROLIFERATIVE VITREORETINOPATHY
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors have made good revision, no further concern.
Experimental design: The authors have made good revision, no further concern.
Validity of the findings: The authors have made good revision, no further concern.
Additional comments: The authors have made good revision, no further concern.


Instruction: You are one of the reviewers, your task is to write a review for the article. You will be given the title of the article, the number of the round in which the article is located, and your order among the reviewers.

Input:
Title: MINING THE POTENTIAL PROGNOSTIC VALUE OF SYNAPTOSOMAL-ASSOCIATED PROTEIN 25 (SNAP25) IN COLON CANCER BASED ON STROMAL-IMMUNE SCORE
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The current manuscript described bioinformatic analysis of the correlation of several protein expression with prediction of colon cancer. However, actual experiment to confirm the current study is missing, which greatly reduced the power of the study. The author should find some stained slides or perform WB or qPCR to confirm the current findings.
Experimental design: The experimental design is logic, but no actual experiment was conducted, which makes it  scientifically weak.
Validity of the findings: The current finding is valid only based on bioinformatic study, actual experiment should be conducted to confirm the findings.
Additional comments: The current manuscript described bioinformatic analysis of the correlation of several protein expression with prediction of colon cancer. However, actual experiment to confirm the current study is missing, which greatly reduced the power of the study. The author should find some stained slides or perform WB or qPCR to confirm the current findings.