PONE-D-21-10979

What's the relative humidity in tropical caves?

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Culver,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’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. Reviewer's comments are appended below. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 16 2021 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 plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Mahendra Singh Dhaka, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

The authors need to strengthen the language and scientific interpretations of the facts throughout the manuscript. Also, the conclusion part should be strong based upon the findings. Recent references should also be included.

Journal Requirements:

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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: Yes

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

PLOS ONE 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

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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: A well-written and original study about the physical behavior of relative humidity (RH) in the atmosphere of two tropical caves. The results are contextualized in an ecological perspective, namely how the subterranean fauna may be influenced by variations in the RH. I truly enjoyed reading the study and learned a lot from it. I have only a couple of suggestions and a few requests for clarification. I hope this revision will be useful.

------- MAIN SUGGESTIONS:

1) Badino was pursuing an interesting line of research on the supersaturation of RH in caves. He told me about this apparent paradox: in a cave, over short periods, the relative humidity can be above 100%. The thing is that, in some caves, you may have a situation where you reach 100% RH, water condensate on all surfaces (that is, everything is covered by a film of water), but the air is so pure that you may reach a point where there are no more air impurities particles (condensation nuclei) where water can condensate. Thus, this “exceeding” water remains stuck in the atmosphere, which can exceed 100% (up to values of 101–102%). The available dataloggers cannot detect this. Before he died, Badino was working closely with engineers to design a tool to measure the “hidden” water content in super-saturated cave atmospheres.

I’m not sure if you want to mention this (e.g. L108–110). Unfortunately, I don’t remember the technicalities and I don’t have the physical understanding to better explain this. The topic was only briefly discussed in this publication (section “Condensation nuclei”):

Badino G (2004) Clouds in caves. S. E. K. A. 2:1–8 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26448070_Clouds_in_caves)

It is an obscure publication in a conference proceeding; If you cannot find it just e-mail me and I will share it with you. I think it could be a relevant publication to other sections of the paper as well.

2) I think it could be worth mentioning future climate change when you discussed the sensitivity of cave organisms to RH variations. The fact is that RH and temperature are linked by the Clapeyron equation, e.g.

Badino G., 2004 - Cave temperature and Global Climate change. International Journal of Speleology, 33 (1/4): 103-114.

If subterranean climate will change, there will be the cascading effects on RH, which potentially will render some suitable habitats unsuitable. We discussed this here:

Mammola, S. et al. (2019). Climate change going deep: the effects of global climatic alterations on cave ecosystems. The Anthropocene Review, 6(1-2), 98-116.

Also, changing precipitation regimes and surface desertification due to climate change will likely feedback to affect the availability of water in caves, with direct repercussions on relative humidity patterns. This is briefly discussed here:

Sánchez-Fernández, D. et al. (2021). Don’t forget subterranean ecosystems in climate change agendas. Nature Climate Change, 1-2.

I think a quick mention of this conservation issue could increase the generality of the study (e.g. in the section at L421). That said, I will understand if you will decide to ignore this: being one of my main lines of research, I have a bias towards overemphasizing the importance of climate change underground.

------- ADDITIONAL MINOR LINE COMMENTS:

-L 111: This is a more recent one relating RH and cave species abundance:

Nicolosi, G. et al. (2021). Microhabitat selection of a Sicilian subterranean woodlouse and its implications for cave management. International Journal of Speleology.

- L 195: The structure of the model is not clear to me. What was the random structure in the model? Season? Did you fit two GLMM for the two caves, or everything together with cave identity as a fixed factor?

- L196: “ … of ar(1) ...” the meaning of this expression is not clear to me.

- Table 1: please define acronyms in the caption.

- L319: the relationship between RH and Fauna: did you tested this statistically?

- L362: Winter effect. Could it partly be because external seasonal variations in tropical climates are more smooth?

-L 392: very interesting the hurricane period effect–another factor that may be affected by global CC.

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PONE-D-21-10979R1

What's the relative humidity in tropical caves?

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Culver,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’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. Editor's comments appended below. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Oct 15 2021 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 plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ 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 academic 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'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Mahendra Singh Dhaka, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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:

Based upon the study, the authors need to incorporate 'Conclusion', before supporting information and acknowledgements.

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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 #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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: Yes

**********

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

PLOS ONE 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

**********

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 #1: (No Response)

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Stefano Mammola

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What's the relative humidity in tropical caves?

PONE-D-21-10979R2

Dear Dr. Culver,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Mahendra Singh Dhaka, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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