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: FAST SEQUENCE-BASED MICROSATELLITE GENOTYPING DEVELOPMENT WORKFLOW
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The study is well-written, although some smaller errors are highlighted in point 8 under specific comments. I suggest either shortening or rewriting the introduction (move around some sections of the intro), for example starting with how was it done before (Line 62) why is SSR important and has gain more attentions lately (line 48-61) and how should we use this markers now in light of new technologies, see point 4 & 6 under General/specific comments.

Raw data is available as stated by the authors. Figures and table are easy to understand, but see point 7 below.

Supplementary data (scripts, fastq, genotyping details etc) is accessible and followed by good documentation for executing the necessary analysis steps.
Experimental design: The study is well suited to the scope of this journal.

The research question concern improved quality of genotyping and broader use of a well-known marker system coupled to new sequencing technologies as well as the implementation of an efficient marker selection procedure/workflow. This is well described and sufficiently detailed for replication. Additional test/experiments to prove the concept is still valid see point 1 & 2 below.
Validity of the findings: Validity of the findings are clear, but I would like to see the suggested test on salmon performed, as well as a better discussion of point 4 and 5 below. Besides these comments, the conclusion is valid.
Additional comments: The authors provide a nice overview on how quickly and reliably one can detect SSRs across phyla, improve genotyping success, ultimately leading to better and more robust analyses of evolutionary processes. It’s a nice study with the aim on integrating many protocol steps, so its of no surprise that many of the steps has been described and used before (or similar/related development and analysis steps). Similar methods is also available from commercial suppliers (https://www.cd-genomics.com/hi-ssrseq.html). Still, I feel it`s important to make such integrative approaches as it makes this important tool more easily accessible to new users, particular users unfamiliar with NGS technologies. In that respects the manuscript provide an easy and quite simple entry into better development of SSR-seq markers. I also like that development tools has both command line and GUI interface with Galaxy for users with different skill levels and preferences.

Specific comments
Below I´ll list in order of importance different subjects that hopefully could improve the manuscript.

1.	It would be nice to see the application of your SSRseq method on the Salmon as well. After all this is the only species you have compared the efficiency of capillary electrophoresis (CE) based loci with direct sequencing. It seems a bit premature to focus on other species until these new SSR-seq markers for salmon are developed and tested as the other species. Furthermore, it will make the comparison with other work on salmon, which your refer to in both result and discussion more interesting (Bradbury et al 2018.)

2.	Next, since its salmon, and as close to a natural model organism you can get, a comparison of two different sets of newly developed SSR-seq loci (20-40 in each set) used on either samples of well-known natural populations or several farmed salmon families with known pedigree is valid. This will add strength to the suggested primer development and selection criteria you suggest, as genetic differentiation and/or family histories/relationships should be similar using either set of loci.

While both 1. and 2. above may seem unnecessary, it will strengthen the overall quality of the study. While CE msats has been difficult to a use over larger geographic scale, as well as being difficult to use with similar sensitivity and accuracy between labs, which is of importance for management purposes (e.g. fisheries and large carnivore management), the inclusion of the suggested tests might be convincing evidence for adopting this step-by-step procedure for monitoring wildlife.

3.	Besides whole genome sequencing reads, i.e. short reads archive, low coverage genomes to more or less fully annotated genomes, please consider if the MSDB (microsatellite database https://data.ccmb.res.in/msdb/, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31599331 ), or similar single species databases (crop species primarily) could be a valuable source for finding repeat loci.

4.	RAD-seq is mentioned briefly in the intro. By many NOT considered expensive, in contrast to the authors claim. Besides its flexible, same RE and reagents used on different species. Other new marker types like MobiSeq (https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.12984) and other reduced representation seq data, as well as their cost, should be mentioned and discussed. After all SNPs do have a simpler mode of evolution. What does SSRseq offer that is better? (its touched upon but higher level of polymorphism could be made better selling points if properly backed up by other studies).

5.	On the subject of primer and loci optimization, Yang et al 2019 (https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2019.00531) used “perfect SSR loci”, or according to them “stable motifs and flanking sequences”. They aimed for higher sequence coverage, and had a remarkable high genotyping success, which should be commented on.

6.	Introduction. Sentence 31-33. Maybe skip the general NGS overview. Not including medicine for instance in fields using HTS is questionable. So, include more research fields or go directly onto SSR-seq (as done in abstract). A better structure could be to start introduction from Line62, the old way of doing it. Then, line 48-62, which highlight new biological aspects of SSR, followed by a new way of generating robust and reliable SSR markers by sequencing.

7.	Figure 2 & 3. Please name colors in parenthesis in the text for each parameters.
8.	Some typos and suggestions (your call), numbers refer to line/sentence no
a.	41: SNPs
b.	62: include “traditional” in front of msat
c.	98: with instead of which
d.	103: is this really a “new” marker?
e.	123: to avoid confusion with sequencers just use “standard capillary electrophoresis (CE)”
f.	191: use “simplex amplification one individual per species”
g.	372: much higher
h.	382: assays
i.	414: resource


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: FAST SEQUENCE-BASED MICROSATELLITE GENOTYPING DEVELOPMENT WORKFLOW
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: no comment
Experimental design: no comment
Validity of the findings: no comment
Additional comments: This is an interesting and well-written paper that describes a workflow to efficiently identify microsatellite markers and genotype them using SSRseq. The authors' findings suggest the importance of sequencing coverage and duplicated individuals in the experimental design, in order to reduce missing data and eliminate markers that cannot be genotyped reliably.

Major points:
282-284 “Loci that showed more than 6% of allelic error or more than 50% of missing data across individuals (within each species group) were flagged as failed and removed from further inspection.”

Could you explain how these thresholds were established? 50% of missing data seems to be a very high level. What happens if the threshold for missing data and allelic error is decreased? Would this eliminate a high proportion of loci? Figures 2 and 3 suggest that the overall missing data and allelic error rate are not so high, but we do not have the information on the distribution of these indices among loci. It would be important to calculate missing data and allelic error rate for each locus separately, and represent the variability of these indices on Figures 2 and 3.

339- 342 “With the pipeline parameters used here, increasing coverage will reduce missing data but not genotyping error rate, however with more stringent pipeline parameters, increasing coverage may have more significant impact on the number of reliable loci genotyped and missing data rate.”

Since you are suggesting anyway that a relatively high coverage is important to reduce missing data, it would be interesting to test if more stringent parameters in allele calling would really reduce allelic error rates in high coverage data. That would be a supplementary argument for increasing data coverage.

344-345 “Focusing the analysis on the repeated motif slightly increased the number of reliable loci and tends to produce fewer missing data and allelic errors (Figure 3).”

The change in missing data and allelic errors does not seem to be evident from figure 3. Please, modify this statement.

447-449 “Additional tests not presented here showed that the two-stage multiplex amplification prior to PCR indexing that was used to increase amplification homogeneity across loci is not necessary:”

It would be nice to present this finding here, since it simplifies even further the laboratory protocols.

Typos and minor suggestions:

Line 252 ‘FInallt’

257 …’genotypes divided by the number of diploid alleles comparred’ => An allele cannot be diploide; comparred=> compared

268 ‘FullLenghth’

363- 365 Conversely… (Table 3).
This sentence is redundant to the previous one. Similarly, the columns ‘% of size Homoplasy’ and ‘% of increase in alleles due to sequence’ in Table 3 are redundant.

372 ‘High’ => higher


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: FAST SEQUENCE-BASED MICROSATELLITE GENOTYPING DEVELOPMENT WORKFLOW
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: The same general impression of a clearly written paper, as from the first round of review.
The structure is now much better and more directly to the point, which is most important for such a detailed protocol paper.

Improvement to figures are good, but see typo "usuing" in figure text for "Supporting figure S1".
Experimental design: The additional comments, se review round 1
Validity of the findings: The additional comments, se review round 1
Additional comments: The authors has largely followed both reviewers suggestions, and/or provided good explanations for why they choose otherwise. That perfectly fine. The structure has improved, and its more interesting to read, down to the points that matters. I thank the authors for presenting this study. Its a clear improvement from the CE based method, and support the community with a step by step method suited for comparison between labs and regions, enabling cheap and robust genotyping over the whole distrubution ranges of species.


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: FAST SEQUENCE-BASED MICROSATELLITE GENOTYPING DEVELOPMENT WORKFLOW
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: no comment
Experimental design: no comment
Validity of the findings: no comment
Additional comments: The authors have answered convincingly all the points I raised in my first review.


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: COMPARISON OF MOBILE AND CLINICAL EEG SENSORS THROUGH RESTING STATE SIMULTANEOUS DATA COLLECTION
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: This study aimed to fill the methodological gap and provide a data analysis pipeline designed to compare the simultaneously recorded data from two multichannel EEG devices. This topic is interesting and the paper is clearly written. This paper may be of great interest to the readers of this journal. However, some comments and suggestions are given.
Experimental design: 1.	They have to show the representative waveforms of both EEG systems and the detailed demographics of the patients.
2.	They didn’t show any feasible and plausible reason why they selected Emotiv for this study.
Validity of the findings: None
Additional comments: None


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: COMPARISON OF MOBILE AND CLINICAL EEG SENSORS THROUGH RESTING STATE SIMULTANEOUS DATA COLLECTION
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: The article submitted present a pipeline for evaluating non-usual EEGs in relation to stablished well known EEGs. The authors make clear the importance of comparing EEG types and how it is usually done in regarding to technical and research validity. The authors point out that there are still limited methods for assessing clinical validity of EEGs.  But it is very important to cite some previous attempts to conduct clinical validation of EEG even though they are not ideal (e.g.: TITGEMEYER et al., 2019; BAROUMAND et al., 2018 and LEITINGER et al., 2016) and discuss their limitation.  If the methodological gap mentioned on line 102 refers to methods of clinical validation of EEG, than it deserves a second look since a quick search shows that there is literature on this metter available; but if the methodological gap refers to something else it would be important to explicitly state what the methodological gap is.

Beyond that, although the authors clearly stated that the goal of the study was to provide a pipeline for data analysis, it was not clear which questions the authors were trying to answer.  The research question could be, for instance: (1) is the mobile eeg as good as the regular one? Or (2) does this pipeline lead us to the same conclusions as other analysis methods? We can only judge a method in terms of the question to be answered. A clear question, and possibly hypothesis about them, would be very helpful.

References
BAROUMAND, A. G. et al. Automated EEG source imaging: A retrospective, blinded clinical validation study. Clinical Neurophysiology, [s. l.], v. 129, n. 11, p. 2403–2410, 2018.
LEITINGER, M. et al. Diagnostic accuracy of the Salzburg EEG criteria for non-convulsive status epilepticus: a retrospective study. The Lancet Neurology, [s. l.], v. 15, n. 10, p. 1054–1062, 2016.
TITGEMEYER, Y. et al. Can commercially available wearable EEG devices be used for diagnostic purposes? An explorative pilot study. Epilepsy and Behavior, [s. l.], 2019.
Experimental design: The pipeline presented appears to be a valuable tool, very well described, straightforward, and useful. Only small suggestion could be made to improve it. On line 125, it could make it even more clear to describe if G1 is ground or reference electrode and where is it positioned. A picture of a participant head with both eeg systems on could implement information provided on line 150 in order to help those aiming to replicate the author’s method.
The software was described only on line 301, it could be better placed before explaining the preprocessing and analysis methods.
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: COMPARISON OF MOBILE AND CLINICAL EEG SENSORS THROUGH RESTING STATE SIMULTANEOUS DATA COLLECTION
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: The writing style is fine.

The literature is well covered and I've only a few additions.

The structure of the manuscript is good, although I'd ask for more complete documentation of results (see below), which will require additional figures.

The manuscript is advertised as a preprocessing pipeline for EEG data. However, the strong point is the simultaneous recording by two systems. Below I criticise several aspects of the preprocessing pipeline, which in its present state is far from being an example to be followed by others. I'd suggest casting the whole story with a focus on the comparison of EEG systems.
Experimental design: In their manuscript Kutafina et al. report on a data set with EEG recordings of 22 patients simultaneously with two different measurement systems. It then focusses mainly on the preprocessing of recorded data and comparison, i.e. correlation, of the data obtained by the two systems.  This is a valuable data set. Further, as patients screening for epilepsy is involved, a direct comparison of detectability of signatures of epilepsy makes the article highly relevant.
Validity of the findings: Well, after the praise above, here are some serious concerns. Below, you find a list labelled according to severity. I shied away from asking additional data (although the time synchronization is in its present form not satisfactory). But it will require a serious effort with reanalysis of data as well as additional analysis. Please thoroughly address all critical issues and the majority of major concerns.
Additional comments: major - The synchronization of recording devices is based on a few hand-waving measures (eye blinking, line 144) and searching for maximal correlation. State of the art is using precisely timed trigger signals send to both recording devices. Using professional tools like lab-stream-layer is highly recommended. Further, the manuscript assumes that after initial synchronization the clocks stay perfectly synchronized (line 242). This is typically not the case. We observe significant linear drift on a regular basis.
    Synchronization during recording can not be added without recording fresh data. Ok. Please search for an optimal match of the two recorded data streams at different points during recording and check linear interpolation of a drift. Further, add a section in the discussion covering this issue.

minor - The reasoning of quadruples becomes clear only later in the manuscript. Explain it the first time when you mention quadruples (line 179).

major - As you are using quadruples that are closely spaced, the bipolar vectors are short and the difference between vectors of the two EEG systems might be significant. You can check quadruples that contain two pairs, that are at a larger distance, each containing one electrode of each system. This way you can reduce the variance introduced into analysis by diverging vectors.

minor - The choice of parameters is complex and contains many fudge factors. Please try to justify the choice of parameters as much as possible by principled arguments and trim down the number of free parameters to adjust. Why has this to be done on a per-patient/subject basis? Isn't it possible to fix these parameters once and for all? Is the optimal choice for each patient very different from others?

unclear - in line 280 you perform cross-validation. "Third, the data are randomly divided into two subsets of 14 training and 5 test records. The parameter set with the best resulting grand average correlation coefficient is established based on the first set and quasi-independently evaluated based on the second set." Is this evaluation on the second set reported here or is there another selection process? Then you would need nested cross-validation.

major - line 298 "If we assume that these differences give a comparable error and the noises are on the same level, " this assumption might be not vlaid. Check for better placed quadruples so that the vectors are well aligned. At least, discuss this critically in the discussion.

major - The observed correlation of 46% appears rather low. (it is the maximal correlation on the training set then validated on the test set?? Otherwise it might be even lower.). It gives an explained variance of 0.46^2= 0.21. That is, only 21% of the variance in one recording is explained by the other. This appear a rather low match. Later you state a slightly higher number of 53%, this difference is not clear to me.

minor - did you use Fischer z transformation forth-average-back while averaging correlation coefficients? As they are not Gaussian distributed, this is a must.


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: COMPARISON OF MOBILE AND CLINICAL EEG SENSORS THROUGH RESTING STATE SIMULTANEOUS DATA COLLECTION
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Paper present proper writing regarding language use, reporting style and necessary information covered.
Experimental design: Research aim and methods are adequate.
Validity of the findings: Authors provided appropriate information on data collected, clearly stated.
Additional comments: It is possible to oberved that the authors considered the suggestions made by the reviewers and impproved their mannuscript. Their scientific work and report present the main characteristics that allow it to be shared with the community.


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: COMPARISON OF MOBILE AND CLINICAL EEG SENSORS THROUGH RESTING STATE SIMULTANEOUS DATA COLLECTION
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: N/A
Experimental design: N/A
Validity of the findings: N/A
Additional comments: I congratulate the authors for this very nice and thorough revision, resulting in a much-improved manuscript. I endorse the publication of this article. Signed, Peter König


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: ENHANCED GENOME EDITING IN HUMAN IPSCS WITH CRISPR-CAS9 BY CO-TARGETING ATP1A1
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: This manuscript from Liu et al. aims to investigate CRISPR HDR efficiency in the generation of series of point mutations in iPSCs. To achieve this the authors transfected Px459 plasmid with various HDR templates (single stranded DNA, double stranded DNA…) and double selected the mutations via Puromycin and Digoxin selection. Overall the authors found that CRISPR HDR efficiency firstly increases with the use of longer homology arms and double stranded DNA and sequence/gene dependent.

Overall this is a very well crafted manuscript. The manuscript is well written, well structured, well referenced.

I have however noted a few spelling mistakes in the manuscript and the Figure legends. Please proofread again the manuscript
Experimental design: The hypotheses are well stated, the introduction and background shows well the context and the manuscript well structured. The methods section describes well the experiments. The results presented are well ascertained and rigorously interpreted. The methods are well described and in sufficient details.

The only comment I have for the authors is the following:

L125: 40 mm electroporation cuvette seems not correct. Do the authors refer to instead a 4 mm cuvette?
Validity of the findings: This is overall a nice study, well conducted and well performed. the data provided are statistically sound and the conclusions well stated. I do have however one additional minor comments to the authors.

My comment relates to the comparison between different donor templates (L270-290) and Figure 3B.  The authors investigated the homology arms length and their types (ssODN, dsDNA…) and found the number of survival colonies increased for a donor plasmid with long homology arms. The length of the homology arms, symmetry and type of donor to improve HDR efficiency has been largely explored since the use of the Zinc Finger nucleases. While the results are sound, my main criticism is this investigation was performed on one locus only. I therefore believe the authors should add a note in the discussion section better outlining the limitations of this finding.
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: ENHANCED GENOME EDITING IN HUMAN IPSCS WITH CRISPR-CAS9 BY CO-TARGETING ATP1A1
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: This is an interesting study to introduce a second “silent selectable mutation” in ATP1a1.  This allows to select iPSC cells where HDR editing can occur, on-target editing of the desired site increased by 35 fold.

The article is clear and the supporting data seem valid.
Experimental design: The question is well defined and testable.  The methods are appropriate
Validity of the findings: The experiments are sound.  It extends the findings of other groups that us ATPa1 mutations as a selection marker.
Additional comments: This is a clever technique, but the disadvantage for disease modeling, since there is a new mutation in ATPa1 could still have some other unknown consequences.  For disease modeling most groups want a true isogenic line.  Also with improvements in iPSC transfection, and Cas9 RNP the vast majority of edits can be isolated fairly easily.

It would be helpful to the discussion, if the authors could provide specific use-cases for needing this type of selection with ATPa1.


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: ASSESSING THE GROWTH IN CLINICAL SKILLS USING A PROGRESS CLINICAL SKILLS EXAMINATION
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Basic reporting is excellent with professional English used throughout. Literature references are appropriate and article is generally well structured. Figures and tables are concise and relevant.
Experimental design: Generally well described in terms of implementation of the PCSE program. However, a few elements should be addressed:

1) The research question is not strongly defined. It is stated that this is a generalizability study of PSCE testing. However it is not emphasized why generalizability is important, and does not define generalizability coefficients (and what are acceptable ranges of these coefficients) for an audience that may be unfamiliar with this concept.

2) It is stated in the result section that "The main effects for administration (linear,
quadratic, and cubic) were also significant (p < 0.001)". These terms should be defined in the methods section especially for  for an audience that may be unfamiliar with these concepts.

3) It is stated that students are assessed over six domains. However these domains are not clearly defined in the methods section. It is stated "Each encounter assesses some combination of <patient interaction skills>, <hypothesis-driven history gathering>, <physical examination>, <counseling> and <safety behaviors> using checklist and rating items completed by the SP. Post-encounter tasks, which are graded by faculty members, assess the <application of medical knowledge>, <clinical reasoning>, and <clinical documentation>." To me, this appears like eight domains (I have enclosed each perceived domain in <brackets>). It would be better if each of the six domains was separated in a numbered list.
Validity of the findings: Generally well reported findings with some areas that need clarification:

1) It is stated that "Table 2 provides a summary of the generalizability coefficients and estimated standard errors of measurement for cross-sectional and longitudinal comparisons". However Table 2 only provides information about the cross-sectional comparison from Spring 2018. It does not provide any longitudinal comparisons.

In fact, this is reflected in the prior methods section when it is stated "we conducted the generalizability analysis on a single administration of the PCSE and used the data from the first administration of the PCSE given in spring semester 2018 for conducting the generalizability analysis."

2) In the discussion, it is stated "Physical examination and the post-encounter stations had the highest generalizability coefficients at around 0.50 for cross-sectional comparisons. The generalizability coefficients were the lowest for second-year students in the patient interaction domain and in the safety domain for both first- and second-year students." These sentences should be part of the results section, not the discussion section.

3) In the discussion, it is stated that safety is assessed by "proper identification of patient and visitors; infection prevention/control; medication safety; handovers; conflict resolution; team, communication; informed consent; risk identification; open disclosure of adverse events; patient and family engagement". This detailed description should be in the methods section, not in the discussion. In fact, each of the six domains should be described with more detail like this in the methods section (perhaps when separated in a numbered list, like I have previously mentioned).
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: ASSESSING THE GROWTH IN CLINICAL SKILLS USING A PROGRESS CLINICAL SKILLS EXAMINATION
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Although the authors provided an Introduction and background of the study, literature review is scanty or inadequate, with only 16 references.  Only 10 out of the 16 references are journal articles, with only 5 of them published in 2010 or later.  The author’s claim that there has been relatively little research done on PCSEs should be supported by more recent literature from journal articles.
Although raw data from the study were provided as a supplementary file, findings of the study were not clearly reported.  In the Results section, two tables and one figure were presented.  However, Table 1 and Figure 1 appear to provide the same data, except that Figure 1 is in the graphical format.  The information displayed in Table 2 needs to be more clearly described or explained in the text.  For the repeated measures ANOVA, the authors just described the results in the text without referring to any output of the analysis or any table(s) summarising the findings, in particular the main effects and interaction.  Furthermore, in the second paragraph of the Results section, descriptive statistics (such as in Table 1 and Figure 1) and inferential statistics (such as repeated measures analysis) were combined.  This is confusing to readers.
Experimental design: Although the research falls within the scope of the journal, no research questions or hypotheses were identified in this report.  Only two study objectives were found in lines 80 to 85.  No gap in research, either theory or practice, was clearly identified and it is not clear how the research fills the knowledge gap.
For both the generalizability (G) study and repeated measures ANOVA, the methods should be described with sufficient detail and clarity to enable replication studies to be conducted.  The authors devoted three pages of the manuscript to the section on Materials and Methods.  However, the G study was not clearly described, and terminology in G study was not used.  The description from lines 149 to 152 was not clear.  For example, “We considered standardized patient case as the only facet in the universe of admissible observations (UAO)”.  Was it referring to SP or case?  Please also define the set of all facets that constitute the UAO.
With regards to the G study, the authors should have identified and/or defined the following:
1.	What are the potential sources of measurement error (facets)?
2.	What is the study design? Is it a one-facet design/two-facet design/multiple facet design?
3.	What is the object of measurement (facet of differentiation)?
4.	What are the sources of variance (facets of generalization)?
5.	Is it a crossed design or nested design?
6.	Is it a one-factor repeated measure ANOVA or a two-factor repeated measures ANOVA…?
The researchers/authors should justify any decision about the inclusion of facet(s), and provide supporting evidence about the inclusion of each facet to the consistency and accuracy of the measurement procedure.  Statistical method like generalizability (G) theory is only useful if it is accompanied by careful experimental design, planning and analysis (Bloch & Norman, 2012).
The following references could be helpful:
•	Bloch R, Norman G. (2012). Generalizability theory for the perplexed: a practical introduction and guide: AMEE Guide No. 68. Med Teach. 2012; 34(11): 960-92. doi: 10.3109/0142159X.2012.703791.
•	Mohsen Tavakol, Robert  L. Brennan. (2013). Medical education assessment: a brief overview of concepts in generalizability theory.  International Journal of Medical Education; 4: 221-222. doi: 10.5116/ijme.5278.a850221
It was only mentioned that GENOVA was the software package used to perform generalizability analysis. However, computation of G coefficients was also not explained.
Validity of the findings: As repeated measures ANOVA is an experimental design, both internal validity and external validity of the study should be considered and discussed.  However, validity of the findings was not reported.
Additional comments: A good attempt at using the generalizability theory instead of the classical test theory to examine reliability of clinical assessment such as OSCE.  However, more recent and adequate literature is needed.  The study design needs much improvement too. Clarity of the writing needs to be enhanced.


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: ASSESSING THE GROWTH IN CLINICAL SKILLS USING A PROGRESS CLINICAL SKILLS EXAMINATION
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: This is an interesting study and addresses a topic of great importance for Medical Education. However, it fails to meet the objective as there is no growth in many competencies (sometimes even decreasing).
Experimental design: I have some doubts about the results of the generalilizability.

Since the goal in a G study is to estimate as many sources of variance as are potentially relevant in order to identify the major sources of measurement error, I ask:

Couldn't the curricular year being included in the analysis as main effect instead of being conducted separately?

Isn't it important to present the variance component for the student and residual variance?

There is no description of the Table 2, which is one of the main results of the study. Does the variance correspond to % of the total variance? If not, how do we know if it is low or high?
Validity of the findings: How can generalilizability be improved? Why not propose a D study?
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: ASSESSING THE GROWTH IN CLINICAL SKILLS USING A PROGRESS CLINICAL SKILLS EXAMINATION
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Acceptable after the revisions I suggested previously thank you.
Experimental design: Acceptable after the revisions I suggested previously thank you.
Validity of the findings: Acceptable after the revisions I suggested previously thank you.
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: PHYLOGEOGRAPHY OF THE WIDESPREAD CARIBBEAN SPINY ORB WEAVER GASTERACANTHA CANCRIFORMIS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: I found the presentation of the paper clear. The introduction is thorough, the methods are complete, and the results and discussion do not draw any inappropriate inferences from the data. The references require special mention as a weak point (see general comments).
Experimental design: The experiments seem largely well thought out and relevant to the questions being asked. My only issues relate to the selection of outgroups and calibration. I elaborate in the general comments but including a theridiid and some of the earlier diverging araneids makes little sense to me in a study focusing on Gasteracantha cancriformis.
Validity of the findings: The results of the paper are well grounded, and where there are questionable relationships (e.g., low posterior probability for Andean split), the authors discuss the possibilities roundly. I think this paper lays the groundwork well for both an expanded phylogeny of gasteracanthine araneids as well as another data point in a future CarBio synthesis of arachnid island biogeography.
Additional comments: Abstract
Background – why is Gasteracantha cancriformis set off by commas?

Introduction
L30 – 'championing' implies intent, no?
L82 – No mention of stabilimenta?
L83 – bold text needs to be corrected
L94 – 'upwards of eight' – surely we can more specific?

Methods
Your outgroup selection is curious. Argiope, Zygiella, and Micrathena are not particularly closely related to Gasteracantha based on recent molecular phylogenies focusing on the family using Sanger (Scharff et al. 2019) or high throughput methods (Kallal et al. 2018), both of which are unmentioned in lieu of older or less specific studies. The theridiid, separated from araneids by nearly 200 million years and the most distantly related family to Araneidae, is also a strange thing to include for an intraspecific study. Of course, I wouldn't recommend rerunning analyses, but reconsidering the relevant outgroups could be relevant for future similar studies from this working group.

L136 – By 'inferring sequences,' do you mean assembling contigs?
L138 – Was MAFFT used with default settings for all three loci? If so, say so; if not, elaborate – especially given COI may behave differently since it is protein-coding.
L161 – Aranoidea > Araneoidea
L170 – Did you also test for stationarity in BEAST by observing the results in Tracer?
L211 – What are those six color morphs? How are they defined? I know there is a citation but it might help to describe them all the same

Results
L223 – I think 'terminals' instead of 'specimens'

Discussion
L307 – 16S and ITS topologies not discussed much in comparison to COI
L313 – undoubtable > undoubtably
L320 – but Andean split with low support.
L336 – WSC date 2020
L355 – Remove comma after 16S

Conclusions
L451 – sea, rather than ocean (I realize they are tantamount as far as dispersal is concerned)
L455 – No comma required after 'Though'
L457 – Do not begin a sentence with an abbreviated genus name.

References
The references are a mess. I went through A-E with over a dozen issues. Please double check them all.

In ref list, not in main text:
Agnarsson et al 2019
Allen 1988
Altekar et al 2004
Bell et al 2005
Boughman et al 2002
Clarke 1962a
Clarke 1962b
Eberhard 2007
Endler 1979

In text but not in ref list:
Allen & Clarke 1968
Bell 2005
Čandek et al 2019
Clarke 1962
Drummond et al 2006

Furthermore, the following could be useful to discuss or at least mention:

Crews & Esposito (2020) Towards a synthesis of the Caribbean biogeography of terrestrial arthropods. BMC Evol Biol
Seems very relevant and they discuss trends relating to past work from this working group.

Tan et al (2019) Phylogenetic relationships of Actinacantha Simon, Gasteracantha Sundevall, Macracantha Hasselt and Thelacantha Simon spiny orbweavers (Araneae: Araneidae) in Peninsular Malaysia. Raffles Bulletin
It includes taxa that would have been relevant to you at the time and discusses the fraught systematics and biogeography of the subfamily.

Figures
Very nice overall. I think fig 4 has some overlay issues. That is, there is something overlapping the left half of B as well as part of a horizontal line overlapping part of the map, most obviously where it crosses Nevis and a horizontal line above Guadeloupe.


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: PHYLOGEOGRAPHY OF THE WIDESPREAD CARIBBEAN SPINY ORB WEAVER GASTERACANTHA CANCRIFORMIS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: no comment
Experimental design: no comment
Validity of the findings: no comment
Additional comments: The manuscript presents a very good data set of a spider species that occurs in the Americas; the samples comprise the Caribbean islands and North and South America. Methods are well described; data are not yet public but are provided and are very well presented. Literature is well presented as well.

Considering the title, the data set and the the quality of the sample design and of the results, I would suggest the authors to do some reformulations on the hypothesis, with some additional analysis that might improve the interest in the article. I am convinced that the data are suitable to address hypothesis about the colonization and populational dynamics of this spider species in the Americas; my suggestions are mainly about the analysis of the molecular data; the morphological data are very well explored.

The title is “Phylogeography of the widespread Caribbean spiny orb weaver Gasteracantha cancriformis” and, indeed, the sample design is focused on Caribbean islands, including significant representatives from other regions. However, the abstract starts with the discrepancies between molecular and morphological taxonomic estimates and the goals (lines 102-107) sound exploratory; in addition, the discussion (line 287)l  begins with “… first phylogenetic and morphological analyses…”.

For my good surprise, along ‘Introduction” a very interesting question is presented concerning the history and colonization of Caribbean region (see lines 47-49). So, having in mind that the genus Gasteracantha has many species but just one in the New World, a preliminary question could be the time of origin of G.cancriformes, or “when it arrived” (vicariance or dispersal, old or recent), and it would need just to include a couple of other Gasteracantha species as outgroups in the dated phylogeny. Anyhow, the diversification of the lineages are so recent (less than 4MY) that is very difficult to talk about speciation (this might lead to a discussion about speciation x incipient diversification, depending on the time of this species branch, and to consider the meaning of the patterns of morphological variation in a recent scenario).

Next, I would like to suggest a populational approach to the data. Populational data are not easy to collect and the authors have such a nice set of samples that deserve to be more explored with phylogeographical methods. The genetic structure is isolation by distance, suggestive of a dispersion process, but the Mantel test can also be applied for each of the three lineages; when there is no IBD, the genetic structure can be tested using a software like BAPS, for example (http://www.helsinki.fi/bsg/software/BAPS/). Estimates of populational (or lineages) expansion/retraction can be explored with bayesian skyline plots; these analyses will complement the descriptions of the branching topology and, together with the haplotypes network, can generate hypotheses about the pathways (and timing) of the colonization of G.cancriformis in the Americas that can be tested with approximate Bayesian computation for model selection (eg. Pelletier & Carstens 2014 - https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.12722).

Minor suggestions:
Methods – please explain why the data was concatenated and how this was done (instead of partitioning the different data sets in a same inference)
Fig 2 – present the time intervals of the nodes (and consider them in discussion).
Table S3 – please indicate confidence intervals for FST


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: FEAR AND STRESSING IN PREDATOR–PREY ECOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE TWIN STRESSORS OF PREDATORS AND PEOPLE ON MAMMALS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Fardell et al. set up a nice review topic that is both cross-disciplinary (bridging ecology/conservation and neuroscience/endocrinology) and novel (in my experience). My main concern throughout the manuscript is that while the authors set up this exciting idea of using fear/stress to inform conservation, the main text of the article does not accomplish this stated goal. Without carrying this central theme throughout the manuscript, the authors risk writing another general "predator-prey in novel habitats" review, of which there are many (e.g., in the last two years alone: Carthey and Blumstein 2017 Trends in Ecol Evol, Fleming and Bateman 2018 Animal Behavior, Gaynor et al. 2019 Trends in Ecol Evol, Guiden et al. 2019 Trends in Ecol Evol). However, I would personally like to see a revised version of the manuscript, because I am genuinely interested to see if routine endocrinology measurements could be used to better conserve animals in highly novel habitats.

Along these same lines, many conservation professionals likely think of “stress” and “fear” as nebulous abstract concepts. My perspective as a behavioral ecologists is that they are definitely important, but I think this paper would benefit from an explicit operational definition of stress, fear, etc. early in the introduction. This would then prime the reader for the sections describing potential applications of this work (Lines 420-516). I think the authors are really on to something important here, but to accomplish this we need something more concrete to frame our thinking.

As written, the “hook” of this paper is all about the combined stress effects of human activity and introduced predators. However, I feel like much of the writing does not focus on introduced predators, but rather could describe any predator at all (as suggested at Line 60). I’m also not entirely sure why the authors suggest that introduced predators will be impose more stress on their prey than native predators (Line 63), as prey often do not even recognize introduced predators as dangerous (Kuehne and Olden 2012 Freshwater Biology). Carthey and Blumstein (2017) Trends in Ecol Evol is a highly relevant paper here that I think should be cited. I suggest that either a) the authors rephrase the hook to more broadly describe predation (from native or non-native species) in conjunction with human activity, or b) try to more explicitly link previous studies specifically focusing on introduced predators throughout the manuscript. Do we really need introduced predators to get the main point here?
Experimental design: Line 99-127: Since this isn’t a systematic review or meta-analysis, I’m not sure that this section brings anything to the table. Perhaps this is a journal requirement, but I personally see no reason for this to be included in the main text.

Throughout the paper, I could quibble with some of the citations, but I think there are a number of good reviews on related (but more general) topics (see my comment in Section 1: Basic Reporting). On line 301 though, I strongly recommend citing Gaynor et al. (2018) Science--a highly relevant study here.
Validity of the findings: As a conservation biologist, I really enjoyed the authors’ section describing the different stress mechanisms experienced by animals. However, I found this level of depth missing from much of the manuscript (e.g., Lines 267-339, Lines 341-392). Based on the Introduction, I expected the majority of this manuscript to focus on how human activity and introduced predators alter the endocrinology, etc. of their prey, yet this critical detail is absent from most of the paper. If the authors are correct in arguing that successful conservation will account for these physiological stressors, at the bare minimum they need to include speculative hypotheses describing how humans or predators are affecting prey endocrinology, but hopefully cite more relevant papers here that have already started to look into this.

I think it’s great that the authors are thinking about how their research could be applied to conservation (Line 475-516), and again I think this paper could stimulate some really exciting research. However, in order to be applicable, I think this section needs more detail and guidance. Once fecal samples are collected, how should we interpret the results? What are some caveats to fecal glucocorticoid sampling? Similarly, the authors describe the reactive scope model but don’t actually attempt to apply this to a CEA. Before this could be implemented, it needs to be much more thoroughly explored.
Additional comments: In addition to the big-picture comments below, I have a number of minor line-by-line comments.

Line 27: I wonder if this statement is biased towards conservation in Australia, where introduced predators represent an especially urgent threat toward native wildlife. In many place around the world, other factors such as habitat loss, pollution, and climate change are seen as more urgent problems than introduced species.

Line 72-74: Not sure what this sentence means.

Line 90: A little awkward, what is the landscape of fear theorem? Never heard this phrasing before. Also, the landscape of fear refers to spatiotemporal variation in the risk of predation—this is distinct from “fear” (broadly defined) or stress. Can you be more clear about how this relates to the concept of stress as presented in this paper, both here and later (Lines 206-233).

Line 106: All manuscripts? Surely not—surely just all manuscripts that were included.

Line 135: Is there a reason why two stresses would be worse than one very intense stressor? If the authors are suggesting that stressors may be more than simply additive, they should consider explaining this in greater detail here.

Line 234: I disagree with this framing—a lot of behavioral ecology literature considers any cue stemming from a predator as a direct cue of risk, while the term indirect cue of risk is reserved for any situation that is associated with risk. Visual stimuli may also be important direct cues of risk, such as carcasses of conspecifics.

Line 253: It is incumbent upon the authors to explain here why olfactory cues of predators would not be directly correlated to risk of predation.

Line 283: “In general, human activity can be comparable to the impacts of predation”. What impacts? How is it comparable? Without more specific and precise writing, this section again is very hard to interpret.

Line 345: “…due to causes dissimilar to those driving global declines”. Not clear what this means.

Line 358: It’s not clear to me why this increased overlap between predators would lead to increased overall predation pressure on prey. Couldn’t you similarly argue that the outcome of this may be decreased predation, as the two predators might directly compete more strongly? Again, I think we need a little more context here.

Line 392: Why? Why is it insufficient to simply study demographic responses to foxes and land use change?

Line 400: This seems like a huge logical leap to me. Why would increased stress necessarily lead to a population collapse?

Line 438-447: I like the application of the landscape of fear here. I wonder if the authors could extend this application even further—is it enough to have low-stress refugia present throughout the landscape, or do we need these refugia to be functionally connected?

Line 480-484: I’m not sure these are all measures of stress. For example, giving up densities can provide information about, among other things, prey perception of risk (i.e., fear). But this strikes me as fundamentally different than stress, and so I encourage the authors to think critically about whether more detail/explanation needs to be included here.

Line 515: What are some examples of appropriate management?

References: Some citations are missing volume/page numbers (e.g., Gaynor et al. 2019). Please address this.


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: FEAR AND STRESSING IN PREDATOR–PREY ECOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE TWIN STRESSORS OF PREDATORS AND PEOPLE ON MAMMALS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors present a thorough synthesis paper that aims to review the effects of predation stress and anthropogenic stress on wild animals, and argues for a consideration of these dual stressors in the conservation of animals living in human-impacted landscapes, using urban and suburban Australia as an example. To my knowledge, no review combining these aspects of predator-prey ecology, conservation, and physiology exists, and this paper is thus a useful addition to the literature. To make sure the paper can more effectively meet the stated goals, I would recommend some substantial revisions to bring out the main ideas of the manuscript and communicate them more clearly.
Experimental design: No comment
Validity of the findings: No comment
Additional comments: The authors present a thorough synthesis paper that aims to review the effects of predation stress and anthropogenic stress on wild animals, and argues for a consideration of these dual stressors in the conservation of animals living in human-impacted landscapes, using urban and suburban Australia as an example. To my knowledge, no review combining these aspects of predator-prey ecology, conservation, and physiology exists, and this paper is thus a useful addition to the literature. To make sure the paper can more effectively meet the stated goals, I would recommend some substantial revisions to bring out the main ideas of the manuscript and communicate them more clearly.

Generally, I noticed that important definitions are often introduced only after several sentences or paragraphs discussing a topic; I would recommend that the authors do a careful read-through and move definitions to the initial introduction of each key term to facilitate audience comprehension of the manuscript.

Additionally, the main idea of each section and paragraph was often buried in the middle of that section or paragraph, sandwiched between background information in a way that made it difficult to parse out what was background and what was a main point or new synthetic idea. The manuscript does have an important, unique perspective – that perspective would shine through more clearly with some succinct topic sentences at the beginning of each paragraph and section.

While I appreciate the thoroughness of the review, I think there was also occasionally more background information than was necessary to convey the main ideas, and some information presented was only tangentially relevant to the arguments of the manuscript. Some redundant background information could be cut, and this would also help improve the length of what is currently a long manuscript. To further clarify the aims and arguments of the paper, I would also recommend some editing of the organization of the manuscript and its sections. It could be useful to, as suggested in the previous comment, open each section with a guiding idea, provide background to contextualize this idea, and then return to the idea to flesh it out more thoroughly. Alternatively, most of the “review” portion of the paper – i.e. background on the different central concepts – could be at the beginning of the paper, and then have the second half of the manuscript focus on the authors’ arguments for how this information should be incorporated into conservation. This is how the paper is currently organized, to a certain extent, but more signposting of what is background/current knowledge and what is the authors’ new synthetic arguments would be ideal.

I also feel that missing from this manuscript is a discussion of the population-level consequences of stress and fear. There is literature that presents evidence for reductions in various measures of fitness (survival, fecundity, fat reserves, etc.) on a number of species in response to chronic stress, and this can have important implications for the survival of populations. Something to this effect would fit well in the first section of the main body or, perhaps, as its own section following the “Landscape of Fear” section. I would recommend increasing the attention paid to this new section and the discussion of conservation management strategies, and reducing the length of the section devoted to discussing detailed physiological responses to stress. Ultimately, I think this review has more value as an overview of the sources of stress that can impact vulnerable species (and the potential conservation actions that can be taken to alleviate this stress) than as a review of the physiology of stress responses in individuals.

Some more detailed comments are included below:

Beginning:

-	I would recommend a few tweaks to the title. The word “stressing” sounds awkward; perhaps change it to just “stress”.
-	I would also recommend some care in the abstract/author comment: the landscape of fear concept does not really support the manuscript’s contention so much as that contention is predicated upon the landscape of fear concept.

Introduction:

-	I would suggest a slight restructuring of the introduction. Line 48 indicates that humans are an “additional” stressor to wildlife; however, no other stressors have as yet been identified at that point in the manuscript. As written, I think the introduction could set the reader up better if it opened with the overview of predator fear and stress impacts on prey, and then introduced the idea that the expansion of human activity can also present an additional stressor to wild animals.

Physiological Responses to Fear and Stress:

-	I think it is important to specify early on in this section the types of organisms considered in this review; some sections of the discussion on physiology were pertinent only to animals with complex brains and central nervous systems, such as vertebrates, while others seemed to be more general. Is the manuscript meant to focus on vertebrates, or are all animal clades the subject of this review?

Behavioural Responses to Fear and Stress:

-	The introduction to this section is fairly confusing as written. I would recommend introducing the landscape of fear concept (“concept” may be more appropriate than “theorem”), then clearly detailing how stress responses to predation in the landscape of fear can impact prey. In this section, Laundré et al. 2010 should also be cited, as they detail the impacts of stress responses in the landscape of fear more generally in that later paper. In the second paragraph (line 219), it is stated that “Theoretically, landscape of fear effects increase exponentially with increasing landscape homogeneity...(Bleicher 2018, Gaynor et al. 2019).” Technically, neither Bleicher nor Gaynor et al. make such an assertion, nor do I think it is true; Gaynor et al. state, and I agree, that in fact landscape of fear effects should increase with landscape heterogeneity, since the differences between high and low risk sites will be more pronounced and prey can more easily avoid high-risk sites. The sentences that follow are a better representation of the current thinking in the field, and I would restructure this section to emphasize these later points instead.

Human Activity as a Fear Inducing Stressor:

-	The last paragraph of this section feels more like a topic (i.e. first) paragraph, but is also very long and I think too numerous in its examples. I’d recommend moving some of the information in this paragraph to the beginning of the section, but also greatly condensing it.

Management Tools to Observe and Alleviate Fear and Stress for Conservation:

-	I like this section and I would like to see it expanded more relative to the review portion of the paper. It gets at the heart of the matter and contains some important ideas. I would recommend reflecting on the ideas presented in this section to help inform where to cut some of the background information earlier on in the paper. What information helps inform these recommendations, and what information has been presented in this manuscript that these new ideas and recommendations do not address? For example, as discussed above, I think the details of the physiological impacts of stress could be summarized more succinctly, but greater attention should be paid to the population- and species-level impacts of physiological stress responses, as these are the scales more relevant to conservation.

I liked the figures and thought they contributed nicely to the paper, particularly the checklist.

Line by line:

Abstract:

- I’d use “negative” or “are harming” instead of “deleterious” – may as well make the language as clear as possible.
- “Conservation management is now beginning to consider the effects of human impacts as tantamount to or surpassing the impacts of introduced predators”: I would recommend toning down this language, as I would argue that management is not only just now beginning to consider human impacts on wildlife, but has been grappling with this for some time; indeed, this is central to the field of conservation. It is just as effective to say that simultaneously [in reference to the prior sentence about introduced predators] human populations also have significant impacts on wild animals.
- I would remove the sentence that presents Australia as an example – while you do extend this example in the manuscript, I don’t think it is necessary in the Abstract and it is distracting as a threat that is picked up and rapidly put down.
- The authors don’t “aim to highlight the need for future studies” – they DO highlight this need! They can remove the words “aim to” as they have succeeded in this goal.
- I found the last sentence of the abstract somewhat confusing, and particularly wasn’t sure what the clause “along with habitat influences” was referring to – I’d recommend clarifying and simplifying this sentence.

Main Body:

- Line 55: The use of “while” suggests that the following clause is in contrast with the previous statement. However, eliciting fear responses is itself one of the ways that predators influence ecosystem functioning (see Schmitz et al. 2004, Schmitz et al. 1997, Hawlena and Schmitz 2012)
- Line 58: This is a slightly misleading/vague definition of the “landscape of fear”. This is an important framing concept for the paper, so I would be more specific and careful with this definition. The landscape of fear is not so much the costs and benefits that prey balance, but the spatial distribution of perceived predation risk that influences prey movement and behavior as they attempt to mitigate risk and obtain essential resources.
- Line 70: But see Zbyryt et al. 2017
- Line 178: This sentence should be towards the beginning of the paragraph, before you begin to discuss fear responses.
- Line 207: I don’t really understand this sentence – it could be rewritten to be more clear.
- Line 259: This isn’t quite the definition of the predation-sensitive food hypothesis as outlined by Sinclair and Arcese; rather, the PSFH states that prey should take more risks when food is scarce and their need for food outweighs their fear of predation. Be careful with definitions here and make sure the papers cited truly support each statement.
- Line 262: Also Smith et al. 2019
- Line 300: Should also cite Gaynor et al. 2018 here
- Line 302: See also Kohl et al. 2018, Smith et al. 2019
- Line 432: This is a lot of references – I think you only need a few examples to bolster this statement.
- Line 482: There is some question as to whether giving-up densities accurately measure predation stress, given the impacts of stress on physiology and thus dietary preference. See McMahon et al. 2018, should probably cite this paper as an alternative viewpoint.

The following papers are also important literature on the topic and should be engaged with in the manuscript (some of these have been mentioned explicitly in the line-by-line comments):

Smith JA, Donadio E, Pauli JN, Sheriff MJ, Middleton AD. 2019. Integrating temporal refugia into landscapes of fear: prey exploit predator downtimes to forage in risky places. Oecologia 189:883–890. DOI: 10.1007/s00442-019-04381-5.
Smith JA, Suraci JP, Clinchy M, Crawford A, Roberts D, Zanette LY, Wilmers CC. 2017. Fear of the human “super predator” reduces feeding time in large carnivores. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 284:20170433. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0433.
Suraci JP, Clinchy M, Zanette LY, Wilmers CC. 2019. Fear of humans as apex predators has landscape-scale impacts from mountain lions to mice. Ecology Letters 0. DOI: 10.1111/ele.13344.
Clinchy M, Sheriff MJ, Zanette LY. 2012. Predator-induced stress and the ecology of fear. Functional Ecology 27:56–65. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.12007.
Say-Sallaz E, Chamaillé-Jammes S, Fritz H, Valeix M. 2019. Non-consumptive effects of predation in large terrestrial mammals: Mapping our knowledge and revealing the tip of the iceberg. Biological Conservation 235:36–52. DOI: 10.1016/j.biocon.2019.03.044.
Vijayakrishnan S, Kumar MA, Umapathy G, Kumar V, Sinha A. 2018. Physiological stress responses in wild Asian elephants Elephas maximus in a human-dominated landscape in the Western Ghats, southern India. General and Comparative Endocrinology. DOI: 10.1016/j.ygcen.2018.05.009.
Zbyryt A, Bubnicki JW, Kuijper DPJ, Dehnhard M, Churski M, Schmidt K, Wong B. Do wild ungulates experience higher stress with humans than with large carnivores? Behavioral Ecology. DOI: 10.1093/beheco/arx142.
Kohl MT, Stahler DR, Metz MC, Forester JD, Kauffman MJ, Varley N, White PJ, Smith DW, MacNulty DR. 2018. Diel predator activity drives a dynamic landscape of fear. Ecological Monographs 88:638–652. DOI: 10.1002/ecm.1313.
Gaynor KM, Hojnowski CE, Carter NH, Brashares JS. 2018. The influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality. Science 360:1232–1235. DOI: 10.1126/science.aar7121.
Schmitz OJ, Beckerman AP, O’Brien KM. 1997. Behaviorally mediated trophic cascades: effects of predation risk on food web interactions. Ecology 78:1388–1399.
Hawlena D, Schmitz OJ. 2010. Physiological stress as a fundamental mechanism linking predation to ecosystem functioning. The American Naturalist 176:537–556. DOI: 10.1086/656495.
Laundré JW, Hernández L, Ripple WJ. 2010. The landscape of fear: ecological implications of being afraid. Open Ecology Journal 3:1–7.


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: FEAR AND STRESSING IN PREDATOR–PREY ECOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE TWIN STRESSORS OF PREDATORS AND PEOPLE ON MAMMALS
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: There is a sizeable amount of background information and literature review in this manuscript, and the review is certainly of broad and cross-disciplinary interest. The combination of themes – from the landscape of fear theorem, to stress physiology, and conservation biology – are themes that are certainly applicable and timely. There have been recent reviews on several of the topics individually (Gaynor et al. 2019 in TREE reviews the landscape of fear; McCormick & Romero 2017 review conservation endocrinology in BioScience), but there are not many reviews that integrate the cadre of perspectives into a cohesive narrative. This manuscript begins to broach that cross-disciplinary divide

The introduction does a good job of introducing the subject for sure; however, the scope of the manuscript is not entirely clear or consistent throughout the manuscript. There is mention that this is helpful for wildlife conservation in the final paragraph of the manuscript, but a good chunk of the latter half of the manuscript talks exclusively about prey species, particularly small mammals.  I actually think that leaning into small mammal conservation is a more sufficient move the way that the manuscript is written, which many of the subsections that talk about Australia-specific conservation issues set the stage for later exploration of how stress physiology and endocrine studies can help in that regard.

In sum, changing the focus of the intro a bit to shift more to prey species conservation, and potentially the residual, bottom-up effects of doing so, would make the argument of the manuscript clearer.
Experimental design: The survey methodology is consistent and comprehensive, certainly no issues there. In fact, part of the potential pitfall of the manuscript is that the comprehensive review contained too many references, without distilling the relevant information to the argument at hand.  There could feasibly be some reorganization of the text to highlight what I gathered to be a logical argument: (1) Australian wildlife – especially small mammals – are being threatened by habitat fragmentation and introduction of invasive predators; (2) Stress physiology and fear dynamics could be used as a tool to create solutions that mitigate loss of threatened or endangered species; (3) urban planning in combination with ecophysiology and behavior could be informed greatly by implementing endocrine function and behavior into habitat construction. At the moment, there is a heavy focus on describing the worlds of stress physiology and the landscape of fear theorem that the ultimate goal of the manuscript gets lost in the minutiae.
Validity of the findings: Though the information in this review is great and substantial, it is hard to follow along and assess what the ultimate goals are of the manuscript. The section on stress physiology defines a lot of the terms and background behind endocrine function, but should focus more on describing the trends that have been previously found in the literature. Work by Francis Bonier and others have done an incredible job demonstrating how stress physiology in birds is all over the map: some species show increases in baseline CORT, some demonstrate decreases, and others no difference as a function of urbanization; which, can serve as a proxy for human activity. The nuance and complexity of stress responses toward human beings is not made clear or elaborated and delving more into the literature about the connections among human activity and endocrine responses would be helpful.  I might suggest putting together a summary table that has a species for each row and the direction of stress response toward a stressor or in alignment with a proxy measure for human activity. Bonier 2012 in Hormones and Behavior is a good start.

For the landscape of fear section, making sure to hone in on a specific trophic level (again, I think the most compelling narrative would be around small mammals) is important, as it seems as though there is a lot of definitions of terms, but not a true synthesis of the material.  In some instances, there seems to be a bit of redundancy, which could be solved by focusing on small mammal responses to predators and humans.  Again, there is a rich literature in fear responses and habituation in species that spend significant amounts of time with humans, including work by Honda et al. 2018 in Science of the Total Environment.

Shoring some of these points up, then making explicit how incorporating stress physiology and human activity helps to create specific strategies that aid in improving conservation, will help to bring the point home a bit more. In that same regard, being more specific about what human activities exacerbate fear dynamics, and which ones actually lead to human shields, is an important distinction that needs to be made in order for the manuscript to bring things home. Because human activity does not always result in fear responses, it is reasonable to predict that human activity may not always elicit acute or chronic stress responses, which would suggest that human activity in some instances is actually a good thing.  Paired with the fact that the human shield hypothesis would suggest that prey species are more protected from natural predators, then it may be possible that small mammals in urban or suburban regions see fitness benefits (albeit, potential costs may include dealing with cats, but this narrative is not fleshed out in the current draft). Spending more time talking about these complex differences and disaggregating human activity to talk about the types of human activities and how they generate differences across the landscape would potentially be powerful.
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: FEAR AND STRESSING IN PREDATOR–PREY ECOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE TWIN STRESSORS OF PREDATORS AND PEOPLE ON MAMMALS
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: Fardell et al. review how predators affect both the ecology and physiology of their prey, and argue that conservation efforts (particularly of mammals, for which we have a rich ecological and physiological literature) could be improved by accounting for physiological stress in conservation. I reviewed an earlier draft of this manuscript, and I appreciate the work the authors have done in addressing all three original reviews. In particular, the authors have shored up the literature cited, revised the organization of the paper, and clarified text throughout the paper.

Unfortunately, the revised manuscript treats predator-prey ecology and physiological/neurological stress quite separately throughout the paper, failing to provide a direct, integrative link between predator-prey ecology and stress. I raised this concern in my first review, and the authors state in their response letter that they did not feel it would strengthen their argument. I strongly disagree, as a true cross-disciplinary synthesis needs to show exactly how each discipline can be applied to the other, rather than simply providing a side-by-side review of literature in each discipline. I will provide an example to demonstrate my point. In the section titled “Managing habitat to alleviate wildlife fear and stress”, the authors write the following paragraphs (I’m paraphrasing the topic sentences here): Paragraph A: the importance of configuration of predation refuge; Paragraph B: the importance of structurally complex habitat; Paragraph C: animals prefer to forage in safe places/times; Paragraph D: humans reduce habitat complexity. In this whole section, I could only find two sentences in Paragraph C that explicitly mention the role of stress (Line 494-496), and even here it is not clear what managers can actually do to reduce the stress felt by animals. I’d like to point out that I don’t think the authors have done a poor job of reviewing the predator-prey literature in this paper—there is a lot of good review work here and I think the authors have done a good job tying together literature about refuge, foraging ecology, and the landscape of fear. However, in my opinion, the review falls short of its stated goal of synthesizing stress and fear literature, which is unfortunate because I think these disciplines do have a lot to learn from each other.

Line 83: I find this wording to be very misleading. A quick look at the Zbyryt et al. (2017) article shows that Zbyryt et al. compared areas of high and low human activity or predator activity, and observed that the lowest stress levels occurred in areas with high predator/low human activity, which prompts Zbyryt et al. to conclude that prey exposed to constant risk may have adapted different responses to stress. I realize that this may seem extremely picky, but the authors’ wording here misrepresents the study’s experimental design (“increase” and “decrease” suggest some experimental manipulation and tracking subjects over time) and thus, intentionally or not, causes readers to misinterpret the original study. I find this particularly problematic for a synthetic review paper, which is tasked with synthesizing and summarizing existing literature—the use of imprecise language in a review paper can in fact potentially generate more confusion. I would suggest that the authors carefully screen the paper for any other potential instances of misleading wording.
Experimental design: No comment
Validity of the findings: Throughout the paper, the authors present stress and fear as something that humans should seek to minimize in prey. For example, Line 511 is a subtitle “Management tools to alleviate fear and stress for wildlife conservation”. Similar language is found in the first sentence of the Abstract, pointing out the negative effects of predators on biodiversity, but not their positive effects. (Line 25). In my experience, this is not always the case—predators provide many important services to society by controlling their prey (Estes et al. 2011 Science provides a great starting point). Taking such value-laden wording out of this paper would help it provide a more objective tone, which would consequently help its application to management (as predators may have net positive effects in some cases and net negative effects in others).

I’m not sure that the authors present a clear plan to help managers assess fear and stress (Line 511-534). The authors state, “Stress in wildlife may be cost-effectively and straightforwardly observed by combining the outcomes of simultaneous measurements from multiple well-established methods” and then go on to mention giving-up-densities, glucocorticoid assays, and habitat assessments. How are managers to make sense of and integrate these three very different types of data? Giving-up-densities—which I am most familiar with here—are difficult and time consuming to pull off, and not without their pitfalls. Moreover, they simply measure the perceived cost of foraging; there’s more nuance in using them to assess fear than the authors present here (how can metabolic costs and missed opportunity costs realistically controlled for?). The authors go on to provide their “reactive scope model” based CEA (Line 545-561), but it is not clear to me how the methods described above (giving-up-densities, glucocorticoid assays, and habitat assessments) could be used to inform or parameterize such a model, or how to interpret the output of this model.
Additional comments: I appreciate the clear definitions of fear and stress added by the authors (Lines 143-167). However, I think that adding a brief (as in, a few words) definition on Line 50 would help even further, since the concept of fear is introduced here before the reader gets a chance to digest the more comprehensive definitions of stress/fear starting on Line 143.

Line 31: Urban areas as “global hotspots of wildlife activity” seems a bit of a stretch. I would recommend rephrasing this to something like, “important habitat for some wildlife species”.

Line 32: Do we need a brief clarification of the operational definition of “fear responses” here, too?

Line 184: This sentence was a bit unclear to me. It seems like the authors are pointing this out as a drawback—why exactly is it a drawback?

Line 317: How does food limitation interact with risk to affect fear/stress in cities?

Line 349: Unclear to me what a “hunting impact” is. Do you mean hunting intensity?

Line 452: What would managing vegetation structure look like?

Line 475: An interesting counterpoint to this is that in eastern North America, invasive shrubs provide very safe habitat for small mammals (Mattos and Orrock 2010 Behavioral Ecology ), but have low biodiversity.

Line 513: How does simply indicating an area as needing intervention provide returns on restoration investment?

Line 522: What is meant by “spatially correlating mapping resources”?

Line 566: In what ways are small mammals declining in Australia? Population sizes, taxonomic diversity? Both?


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: FEAR AND STRESSING IN PREDATOR–PREY ECOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE TWIN STRESSORS OF PREDATORS AND PEOPLE ON MAMMALS
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: Overall, I am very happy with this revision – the revised manuscript is much clearer and easier to read than the prior draft, and provides an important contribution to the literature by simultaneously reviewing the stress impacts of predation and human activity on mammals. The authors close by providing recommendations for conservation management that take into account stress impacts from native predators, introduced predators, and human activity. I have only minor comments remaining, and very much enjoyed read this thorough and constructive review.
Experimental design: This is a well-designed literature review.
Validity of the findings: The authors satisfactorily review the literature on predator- and human-induced stress responses in mammals and provide sound conservation recommendations.
Additional comments: My only remaining general comment relates to Figure 2. In the figure, and associated caption, the authors recommend supplementation of resources such as water or nest boxes as an additional conservation measure in high-stress environments – however, this recommendation does not feature prominently in the main text. I think it is an interesting idea, since stress can inhibit an animal’s ability to obtain vital resources while minimizing risk, though it could also have unintended consequences (e.g. bolstering populations of introduced predators and competitors, providing high-use sites where predators can easily pick off prey). I think that if the recommendation is to remain in Figure 2, which I think it should, it should also be discussed more extensively in the text, in the same section where engineering habitat structure in discussed as a conservation measure for stress reduction. I understand that the paper is already long; however, I think just a few sentences or a short paragraph would suffice to discuss the suggested management approach, its potential benefits, and any potential negative consequences to be considered.

Line-by-line Comments:

- The sentence in lines 62-64 is quite awkard/confusing; would reword in a more active voice “Climate change and associated shifts in primary productivity can also have bottom-up impacts on predator-prey interactions.”
- Line 87 – would change “discipline” to “disciplinary”
- Line 103 – would remove “ – in the context of the landscape of fear”, I think it makes the sentence a little long and clunky and the point can be left for the main body.
- Line 340 – would say “than in top predators”
- Line 343 – remove comma after “above-mentioned”, replace em-dash and “including” with comma
- Line 344 – change  “, and perhaps even stronger if it adversely disrupts foraging” to “and disrupting foraging”
- Line 345 – Start new sentence: “Humans can also act as super-predators ...”
- Line 347 – would reword sentence to “Trophic cascades can also arise when human activity has non-consumptive effects on the ecological roles of large predators”
- Line 356 – would refer to “top-down” and “bottom-up” effects with the hyphen throughout
- Line 372 – change “traffic/roads/vehicles” to “roads and vehicles”
- Line 372 – remove “such as snow sports/marine/sports/land sports” – recreational activities is clear enough and having more words complicates the sentence
- Line 373 – replace “otherwise” with “designated”
- Line 373 – replace “can manifest as physiological stress impacts or in the complete displacement of wildlife, particularly predator species, and outweigh any positive effects” with “can lead to physiological stress or displacement, countervailing positive effects of humans on wildlife.” – reads as confusing as is.
- Line 411 – replace “; namely:” with “, including”
- Line 438 – I would delete “via cumulative impacts....naturally in ecosystems”; let the figure explain!
- Line 470 – I think this is far more citations than is needed to justify this point; this occurs in a few other places as well. If the journal prefers that the reference list be cut, and also to ease the flow of reading (which can be hampered by interruptions of long reference lists), the authors could choose a review paper and a few seminal papers to make this and other points. I defer to the editor, but generally five citations is more than enough to bolster a general point such as this.
- Line 492 – change “in landscape of fear habitats” to “in landscapes of fear,”
- Line 500 – delete “and thus should be of particular importance in such management in the future” – this point is made later in the paragraph and it makes the sentence longer and harder to read than necessary
- Line 569 – change these semi-colons to commas
- Line 585 – cite this study in this sentence, not the following one.

Figure 1: In the caption, perhaps the authors can explicitly list the introduced stressors represented in the figure, as is done for the habitat stressors.


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: FEAR AND STRESSING IN PREDATOR–PREY ECOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE TWIN STRESSORS OF PREDATORS AND PEOPLE ON MAMMALS
Review round: 2
Reviewer: 3

Output:
Basic reporting: The authors have incorporated a substantial amount of edits to clarify many of the important points of their review and highlight the compounding influences of predators and urbanization on prey species.
Experimental design: The study design has been further clarified for the reader and the reorganization of text has helped in that regard as well.  Well done!
Validity of the findings: I very much appreciate the increased emphasis on application of stress physiology to increasing conservation and management efforts, and think that this was done particularly well.
Additional comments: Great work!


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: FEAR AND STRESSING IN PREDATOR–PREY ECOLOGY: CONSIDERING THE TWIN STRESSORS OF PREDATORS AND PEOPLE ON MAMMALS
Review round: 3
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: I think this review has improved greatly over previous drafts – in particular, the language and organizational structure is much more clear. I am also pleased with the addition of the discussion of the pros and cons of supplementation, and would now recommend the paper for publication. I have included a few small language edits below that could be addressed in minor revisions or at the proof stage, if the authors and editor see fit.
Experimental design: No comment
Validity of the findings: No comment
Additional comments: Line-by-line:

Line 25: This first sentence I think is a little misleading, in that it frames all predators in a negative light despite the fact that native predators are important components of ecosystems. Perhaps change to something that indicates that predators induce stress effects in prey generally [less negative, just a statement of fact], and introduced predators can have particularly harmful effects on native biodiversity. This is similar to what the authors do well in the introduction.
Line 71: I would replace “that is” with a comma, reads more clearly that way.
Line 87: Replace “it” with “stress”
Line 240: Perhaps leave the animal vulnerable to future “threats” rather than “stressors”? Since part of the point is that the animal would not exhibit a stress response to something it should – so that threat is not a stressor, in the physiological sense, but still presents a tangible threat to the animal’s fitness
Line 248: Replace “show variable reactions due to” with “show that reactions vary with”
Line 254: Change to “a consistent stress response pattern has yet to be observed in birds”
Line 343: Change “among” to “within”
Line 357: I would change “top-down” to “trophic”; trophic cascades are inherently top-down
Line 404: Remove both commas
Line 405: “Behavior, endocrine, and other traits” is awkward wording; do you mean to refer to these as nouns or adjectives?
Line 411: Switch order to “increasingly observed”
Line 421: Remove semicolon
Line 419-433: I don’t think this paragraph is necessary. It’s a grab bag of all the ways we know humans negatively impact biodiversity, which has been well reviewed in other papers and is ultimately not what this paper is about, and it doesn’t include any analysis beyond listing these impacts. This paper specifically deals with stress impacts on animals living near humans, which are thoroughly covered in the rest of this section. I think it could be easily cut.
Line 492: Would reword to “include increased parasite resistance in nestling birds after supplementation with high-quality food during the stressful young-rearing stage”. Then separate this really long sentence with two examples into two sentences. The second clause (about corridors) is very confusingly worded, I’m not really sure what it’s trying to say. Perhaps reword in active voice that clearly indicates a) the problem, b) the intervention that was made and C) the positive result that occurred – it seems to currently be telling that story backwards.
Line 620: Change “was” to “were”


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: ACTIVITY-SPECIFIC MOBILITY OF ADULTS IN A RURAL REGION OF WESTERN KENYA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 1

Output:
Basic reporting: I found the paper is well organized, easy to understand. Studying mobility in relation to accessibility and quality of life is an important topic and fit with the journal scope.
Experimental design: The author experimental design is acceptable: using survey and GPS tracking devices for two one-week periods.
Validity of the findings: Data analysis, however, remain limited and could be further improved with more visualizations. The  key maps that readers would like to see are of all related facilities (i.e. farms, health care offices, water sources, markets, neighborhoods/villages, places of worship, etc.); of participant’s homes; of participant’s GPS tracking positions.  This help to bring the analysis to a much finer scale. Visualization could be for all participants or groups of specific characteristics.

Indeed, arguments for accessibility is weak without knowing where all the facilities are in relation to the survey participants’ houses. Maps help to bring in the spatial perspectives in term of how far these are away from houses, what routes were taken, and if one would choose a facility because of preference over the shortest distance.
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: ACTIVITY-SPECIFIC MOBILITY OF ADULTS IN A RURAL REGION OF WESTERN KENYA
Review round: 1
Reviewer: 2

Output:
Basic reporting: No comment, everything looked great!
Experimental design: The experimental design and layout was sound.
Validity of the findings: The validity of the findings were sound and the results matched the study design.
Additional comments: PeerJ Manuscript #38955

Activity-specific mobility of adults in a rural region of western Kenya

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to review this very interesting manuscript. The methodology is appropriate and the findings are strong. The authors found that there were demographic differences in activity and mobility within communities that could be further explored specifically in terms of access to healthcare. They used survey collection methods and GPS data loggers to measure activity space and compared these two methods, which was quite interesting. I manuscript as written is very stong and has public health impacts especially in the areas of healthcare and resource accessibility in rural sub-Saharan African communities. I have no large critiques of the manuscript but several smaller comments to be addressed.

Comments

Methods:

Is a single week representative of regular movement patterns? Why was this time unit chosen?

What is the reasoning behind selecting the household member who spent most time looking after livestock selected? Could this have biased the responses on the survey and generalizability of the GPS data?

What was the time interval used for GPS location collection? Were the devices pre-programmed to power on and off at specific time intervals or collecting constantly?

Were any of the GPS units unable to be recovered from participants or any evidence that participants didn’t wear/forgot to wear the GPS unit during data collection?

For the survey data, were the locations pre-defined and generic or were they based on pilot data and maps of the study area?

Results:
How far back were visits assessed in the survey? It looks like visits per month or per year but the GPS data was for 1 week. How were these differences in time period reconciled?

A range of 2-97% of the time with a known location visited outside the home with the GPS is a wide range. Why was some of the movement not able to be characterized? How were these locations obtained and categorized?

27 of how many GPS datasets were there with matching survey data?

It’s not clear why all points captured by the GPS could not be assigned a location that corresponded with the survey data. This is why it would be helpful to know the capture interval that was used to calculate time spent in locations.

It is difficult to assess accuracy comparing the survey and GPS as neither would be considered the gold standard for movement and activity space data. However, one is an objective measure and one is subjective. In the manuscript the authors are using the survey as a the gold standard measure and comparing the accuracy of the GPS data to that without explaining the data collection intervals and potential errors in the collection of data in known locations. For example, time spent in places of worship and frequency of visits to places of worship were greater than the GPS collected, but the authors not that recall bias of participants more likely to recall these if they have more meaning, but neglect the potential for social desirability bias. As the GPS is objectively collecting these data they may be more accurate than reported as participants may report these movements more frequently as they may be seen more positively by others compared to more frequent visits to other households for socializing which they may under report by comparison.

Discussion

In the discussion the authors represent the GPS data as the more accurate compared to the survey data, which is stated differently in their presentation of the results. This discrepancy should be corrected. The recall bias and social desirability bias lay within the survey data and not the GPS data which is the more objective measure.

Smartphone data would be biased towards wealthy people in this area which is correct, though smartphones are becoming more numerous in many SSA settings. The larger problem with smartphone GPS collection is that many of them rely on the cell towers and cell reception rather than GPS satellite technology so they also require data plans and a reliable cell phone network.

Conclusion

The demographic differences in healthcare and water access are really interesting. I think one of the main conclusions of this study that may not be highlighted in the conclusions is the amount of time spent at healthcare facilities found in the surveys. The accessibility not only involves the distance and time traveled, but the wait time and time spent there. This is another angle that could use more research and can inform policy.