PCLM-D-21-00005Who will be where: Climate driven redistribution of fish habitat in southern GermanyPLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Basen

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The reviewer(s) suggest some major revisions to your manuscript. Therefore, I invite you to respond to the reviewer(s)' comments and revise your manuscript before consider it for publication. I look forward to receiving your revision in due course.

Please submit your revised manuscript within the next 30 days to all comments. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Wei Yu

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

1. Please note that your Data Availability Statement is currently missing the DOI/accession number of each dataset. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will be asked to provide these details on a very short timeline. We therefore suggest that you provide this information now, though we will not hold up the peer review process if you are unable.

2. Please provide us with a direct link to the base layer of the map used in figures 1 and 2 and ensure this location is also included in the figure legend. 

Please note that, because all PLOS articles are published under a CC BY license (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), we cannot publish proprietary maps such as Google Maps, Mapquest or other copyrighted maps. If your map was obtained from a copyrighted source please amend the figure so that the base map used is from an openly available source.

Please note that only the following CC BY licences are compatible with PLOS licence: CC BY 4.0, CC BY 2.0  and CC BY 3.0, meanwhile such licences as CC BY-ND 3.0 and others are not compatible due to additional restrictions. If you are unsure whether you can use a map or not, please do reach out and we will be able to help you. 

The following websites are good examples of where you can source open access or public domain maps:

* U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) - All maps are in the public domain. (http://www.usgs.gov)

* PlaniGlobe - All maps are published under a Creative Commons license so please cite “PlaniGlobe, http://www.planiglobe.com, CC BY 2.0” in the image credit after the caption. (http://www.planiglobe.com/?lang=enl)

* Natural Earth - All maps are public domain. (http://www.naturalearthdata.com/about/terms-of-use/)

3. Please  amend your Financial Disclosure statement. This is published with the article, therefore should be completed in full sentences and contain the exact wording you wish to be published.

i) Please include all sources of funding (financial or material support) for your study. List the grants (with grant number) or organizations (with url) that supported your study, including funding received from your institution. 

ii). State the initials, alongside each funding source, of each author to receive each grant.

iii). State what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role in your study, please state: “The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.”

iv). If any authors received a salary from any of your funders, please state which authors and which funders.

4. Please ensure that the funders and grant numbers match between the Financial Disclosure field and the Funding Information tab in your submission form. Note that the funders must be provided in the same order in both places as well. Currently, The Financial Disclosure states: "This study was supported B. Schneider and U. Bergdolt and financed by the LUBW Baden-Württemberg."

While the Funding Information has the following information:

LUBW Baden-Württemberg, Dr. Timo Basen

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: I don't know

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors produced quite an interesting study analysing the distribution of six species of freshwater fish and parameters of their econiches using SDMs.

The main problem of this paper is quite a bad organisation. At the moment, it looks more like an environmental report, rather than a scientific paper with clear scientific objectives, presentation of innovation, results and relevant discussion. There are too many general and trivial sentences that are not really relevant to your local study of distribution of these six species.

I think that the authors may be able to revise their paper accordingly, hence I recommend to re-consider it after major revision.

Specific comments:

Line 15. I would suggest not mentioning Anthropocene in relation to sustainable ecosystem management – as Anthropocene goes quite deep in time in the past, when there was no any subject like ecosystem! It will simply avoid any misconceptions.

Lines 13-36. The abstract is very long. Please restrict it to your findings, and conclusions.

Lines 44-81. This whole large part of the Introduction contains trivial and general information about climate change and usage of SDMs, and is not really relevant to the paper. You have to re-write it completely, clearly indicating what is known about distribution of your 6 species of fish and their possible changes in the past, then very short how SDMs help to delineate the species ranges, and then how they may be used to predict the future distributions.

Lines 85-86. Not everyone is familiar with two RCP scenarios – please put a bit more detail.

Lines 97-102. I think that the clear aim of the paper (which is missing now) should be put into here.

Lines 105-114. This paragraph should go to Introduction section.

Lines 115-123. When extracting the data – all season were pulled together? You have to justify it – are there any seasonal migrations associated with your fish? If so, they should be treated separately by season.

Lines 316-348. Again, this section contain quite a lot of general and trivial information, and should be really reduced to one conclusive paragraph.

Reviewer #2: I do not have expertise in the topic. I request the editor to pass the manuscript to other potential reviewers. It is better to be reviewed by a close expert for a justifiable review. Good luck.

Best regards

Reviewer #3: Comments on “Who will be where: Climate driven redistribution of fish habitat 1 in southern Germany”

General comments:

The study modelled the spatial distribution of six European fish species in southwestern Germany using Maxent, and projected their future distribution under two carbon pathways in three timeframes according to 13 global climate models. The species selected and the climate models used in this study represent a wide range of ecological possibilities and address variability associated with future climate projections to certain extent. The manuscript is overall well written and the statistical are solid, and their results may serve well for the management of the selected in the face of changing environment. Yet, some necessary details in methods and analyses are missing in the current manuscript, which make it hard to follow in the first read. The Introduction may be revised by explicitly specifying the study objectives. The results section can also be reorganized according to those aims, and more insights are expected by incorporating the analyses of multiple species.

Specific comments:

Line 17: data used to train (fit) the Maxent model may be mentioned here.

Line 50: not necessary so as organisms can also be adaptive to environmental changes.

Line 59: may include relevant information about the study area here.

Line 61: no need to split the paragraph.

Line 102: objectives of this study may be summarized here. Details about the target fish may be shown in the methods section.

Line 130: More details about the Maxent algorithm are recommended as it is the base of this study.

Line 143: a table summarizing the unit, range, average and dispersal of all variables is recommended in the main texts addition to Table S1.

Line 147: need more information about the cross validation.

Line 151: should explain the purpose of assessing niche breath and niche overlap

Line 154: references for the method

Line 159: may use additional subtitle like “Distribution projection”.

Line 171: no mention of the variables used for projection.

Line 176: not quite a suitable subtitle.

Line 179: should provide more details about how to validate the model, in addition to the use of AUC.

Line 180: or less than 0.5 if the model is worse than random guess.

Line 184: “Statistics were calculated with R (packages: , emmeans, gtools, PMCMRplus, stats) and Past (version 4.01, (55).” Multiple typos.

Line 187: not quite clear

Line 189: It won’t be necessary if there was only one subtitle in the Result.

Line 192: Important information should not be put in parentheses.

Line 195: the information of model validation were not exhibited and explained sufficiently.

Line 208: The varying results of 13 climate models may be mentioned.

Line 260: More details should be included in the results.

Line 262: it could also because of the missing of essential environmental variables, biotic or abiotic.

Line 272: a table to summarize the those information is recommended, in addition to the figures.

Line 282: The changes of fish communities would involve biotic interactions in addition to the species’ response to climate changes. Cautions are needed for such conclusion.

Line 314: It would be valuable to have a comparison or synthesis of the results from different species, given the six species selected for certain purposes in this study.

Tables 1and 2 were not sufficiently interpreted in the main texts.

Figure 2: legends may be more helpful.

Figure 4 may be explained in the methods section.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

PCLM-D-21-00005R1

Who will be where: Climate driven redistribution of fish habitat in southern Germany

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Timo Basen,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. The authors have addressed most of the reviewers' concerns but some minor revisions are still needed. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please address the minor comments raised by the reviewers on evaluation of your revised manuscript.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 10 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Wei Yu

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #3: I think my previous comments have been properly addressed. However, the revision gives rise to additional problems:

Line 121: I think the Maxent algorithm is a machine leaning technique based on maximum entropy, rather than a type of logistic regression model.

Line 144: It is not typical for cross-validation to split data into 20 folds, as five or four-fold CV is most commonly used. Please explain.

Reviewer #4: This study uses MAXENT to evaluate distribution patterns of six freshwater species under future climate change scenarios based on data from multiple GCMs. This is a conventional analysis framework but is still indicative for management and conservation. Overall, the paper is well written and statistical processes are solid, but lack of more background information and summary hinder understanding the significance of this study. It puts forward more requirements on the Introduction and Discussion. More contents are needed in the Introduction to describe the necessity of this study, and more discussions are suggested to provide implications for fishery management and conservation. I have read and also agreed with comments from the other two reviewers. Following I give several comments or suggestions for the author to further polishing the manuscript. Please see the attachment.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

**********

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Comments.docx

Who will be where: Climate driven redistribution of fish habitat in southern Germany

PCLM-D-21-00005R2

Dear Dr. Basen,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Who will be where: Climate driven redistribution of fish habitat in southern Germany' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact climate@plos.org.

Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Wei Yu

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

***********************************************************

Based on the comments from the reviewers, this manuscript is ready for publication.

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #3: I think my comments have been properly addressed. One additional suggestion is the resolution of figures should be improved, and vectorgraph such as PDF should be preferable comparing to TIFF.

Reviewer #4: The authors seem to address all of my concerns, and I recommend to accept the manuscript for publication.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #3: Yes: Chongliang Zhang

Reviewer #4: No

**********