PONE-D-20-34956

Application of biological and fisheries attributes to assess the vulnerability and resilience of tropical marine fish species

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Sathianandan,

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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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

Reviewer #3: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

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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: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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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: 1) The manuscript is technically sound and the data support the conclusions. More could be done with the data, however, and the data set could be clearer. I could not access the attached data file, so I could not fully evaluate the data.

2) Very few statistics were presented. Most of the results were presented as categories of resilience or vulnerability. I suggest the authors consult biostatisticians to consider appropriate statistical tests.

3) No, I could not access the attached file.

4)The manuscript is written in standard English and with the exception of a relatively small number of sentences, was easy to read. I found the manuscript, however, to be overly verbose and repetitive. The manuscript was much longer than it needed to be and had too many small sections. It should be streamlined. Also, the authors spent too much time describing the data in the tables and figures. They would have a stronger manuscript if they spent more time interpreting their results instead of repeating what readers can see in a table or figure.

5) Additional statistics would help. For example, the authors describe the range of values they calculated, but it would be useful to know the values of each quartile of the data, or median, mean, and 95% confidence interval of the data. Statistical analyses could then be conducted to compare different taxa or fisheries. In the Discussion, the authors suggest that these types of analyses could be conducted on a regional basis, but it seems as though they have the data to do that. Why didn't they? A major comment I have is that these types of analyses have been conducted around the world, but there are very few references to indicate that the authors have read or considered other researcher's work.

The authors have clearly spent a great deal of time collecting data to evaluate the vulnerability and resilience of fishes in India. Their topic is of great interest to people all over the world. If they would delve more into the world literature and conduct some additional analyses, they could make a strong contribution to fisheries management. The Discussion section would be strengthened by a more detailed discussion of how their results could be applied to fishery management.

Reviewer #2: Overall comments:

Thank you for the opportunity to provide feedback. This manuscript was an interesting read and tackles an important issue for improving fisheries management of multiple species in Indian coastal waters. The authors demonstrate the need for such information in the introduction, and they explore the utility of using biological and fishery attributes to quantify the resilience and vulnerability to different fish species using three metrics. While I think the manuscript would be thematically appropriate for this journal, I think there are substantial issues with the level of detail and writing clarity provided in this draft, which makes it difficult to assess the authors’ approach. Thus, I cannot recommend this manuscript for acceptance in PLOS ONE at this time. I provide general and specific comments below to assist in efforts to improve the manuscript.

General comments:

- In general, this manuscript would benefit from a careful proofreading, as there are numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes throughout. I highlight some of these in the Specific comments below. This may help the writers clarify their meaning in some sections of the paper, which will be helpful for the overall interpretability.

- There are many statements throughout the introduction and discussion that would be much stronger with a supporting citation. I think this manuscript could do a more thorough job of incorporating relevant published work.

- I do not agree that resilience and vulnerability are innately opposites, as is hypothesized here. As indicated in L652-653, you expected high R with low V (or vice versa) but did not always observe this result. This does not surprise me, since the two indices you calculate (R and V), while complimentary, describe attributes of each species/fishery that are not necessary inversely related (or related at all). At points throughout the manuscript, it is implied that R and V are inversely related, and these statements need to be adjusted to either justify this expectation by the authors or to clarify their expectations if my interpretation above is incorrect.

- A figure showing a map of the study regions (data source areas) would be helpful and could be referenced throughout the manuscript to provide better spatial context (e.g., L192-193, L870-873)

Specific comments:

L22: delete “was estimated”.

L28: “large-sized” should be changed to “large”.

L30-31: delete “by the species within the same family”.

L33: rather that “contradictory results”, use something like “different species vulnerabilities” or “different fish management priorities”.

L47: “species of diverse” should be “species with diverse”.

L50: delete “number of”.

L89: both mentions of “is” should be changed to “are”.

L106-107: with regard to the Hilborn et al. (2020) citation, is there any information available to allow you to describe the state of the fisheries used in this study? Are they “in poor shape” as you say?

L115: BMSY and FMSY have not been defined elsewhere in the manuscript.

L119-127: This paragraph brings up an important point. You describe 133 species, but use data from 644 stocks. Are there multiple stocks for some of these species? If so, how were data from different stocks combined for a single species?

L141-143: although the original paper is cited, I believe it would be helpful to briefly describe the attributes from the siFISH analysis that were important for the sustainability classifications you list.

L145-147: 4 values of K are listed for 3 classes.

L152: ∞ symbology is incorrect here and throughout the manuscript (file error?)

L152: Should mention the general species/stocks that Musick (1999) uses so we can assess how comparable these approaches are.

L155: how were these thresholds identified?

L158-168: while this citation seems appropriate for this paper, there are several terms that could use some brief additional detail to help the reader follow. For example, the meaning of “adaptive capacity” is unclear. What types of variables fit this criteria?

L192-193: were these ecoregions sampled equally? It would be very beneficial to include a figure with a map showing the ecoregions from which data were collected.

L194-196: the database is not currently accessible via Google Drive.

L197: Table 1 does not seem necessary to include in the main body, especially since the INMARLH index in referenced sparingly in the manuscript. This table could easily be move to supplemental files. The last two rows in the table are included despite no papers referred and can be deleted. Is there a reason to describe this index in such detail given how little it is used in the manuscript?

L202: this point is worth bringing up in the discussion; does data availability here limit or bias the results in any way? What other attributes, if any, do you think could improve these calculations? You could go into greater detail on L561, for example.

L205-212: Table 2 should be in the supplemental file rather than the main body text.

L206, 213-216: Figures 1a & 1b do not seem necessary to me as presented. It would be good to indicate in the text, while describing the variables, the sample size (N) for each. You could likewise describe the distributions of scores (means, SDs, ranges, etc.) for each attribute in a table in the results. If you want to include such figures in the supplemental materials, the quality needs to be improved.

L224: This caption should do more to clarify what high scores for resilience and vulnerability indicate.

Table 3: The logic column would benefit from citations for many of the statements (these could also be included in the attribute descriptions that follow). Is the scoring system for landing price backwards (see also L309-310)?

L242: how many species required use of this proxy?

L267-268: clarify what is meant by “maximally distributed”.

L278-283: it is unclear how we should interpret these scores. How did you decide on cutoffs to adjust distributions to rankings?

L315-316: can delete this sentence.

L326: parenthetically indicate whether x-axis refers to resilience or vulnerability.

L343: “quickly” should be “accurately”.

L369-371: there needs to be more elaboration on your methodology. It is hard to follow what was done here.

L381: doesn't your IRV only represent Indian stocks? How comparable are IUCN data from other regions in these cases? That needs to be considered when comparing these indices.

Table 4: I like the idea of this table. To make it easier to follow, you might consider using vertical lines to separate the resilient, vulnerable, and risky sections.

L427-429: Figure 3 is very helpful for describing overall patterns. The separate plots (Figures 4-7) work better for interpretation; I suggest keeping Fig 3 and combining Figs 4-7 into Figs 4a-d. How are Figs 4a and 4b are currently split? Is there a reason for this? Make sure to reference Table 2 (or if it move to supplemental table) in the figure caption so readers can identify the species shown on each plot.

L434 and L453: You start to describe reasons for the classification…this should go in the discussion.

L471: should we be concerned that the most resilient species has an IRV of 0.52, and not closer to the theoretical maximum value? What aspects of the biological and fishery attributes for this species give it the highest IRV? Should we be concerned about Indian fish stocks overall? – all things to be considered in the discussion.

Figure 8: This figure could either be broken into descriptive statistics (for example, can include with L473-475) or would be improved by color coding the bars in a stacked histogram to show the distribution of IRV scores by family.

L481: “scores” = IRV scores?

L483-484: why use the 6 most sensitive attributes and not 1, 3, 5, etc? Justify the cutoff and selection process used.

L485-486: why evaluate only the 10 most resilient and vulnerable species, rather than compare IRV and sIRV for all 133 species? In Fig 9, the classification of species doesn't change for any of the species shown, but what about intermediate ones?

L500: why were these 11 species chosen for comparison?

L504-505: do differences in these indices show any trends across particular groups (elasmobranchs, etc)?

L540-541: this idea needs to be elaborated on further in the discussion.

L576: curious if there is any concern about gear bias in the results. Related to this, is gear regulation (e.g., changing mesh sizes) an option for targeted management of at-risk/vulnerable/less resilient fisheries?

L586-587: were there any temporal trends in the other variables besides Er?

L609-610: CVs (or SDs) are great for describing variation in the data; these would be better reported in the results section and interpreted here.

L616: also depends on the severity of the impact, right?

L635-636: do people use smaller mesh size when targeting smaller species? Does this minimize the effect described here?

L666-667: Evaluations and reporting of statistics for these comparisons should be made in the results section.

Figures 10 & 11ab: These should be referenced and described in the results (maybe ~L505).

L692: what is meant by “marginal”?

L698: it is unclear what is meant by “inconsistent weights will cause bias in the analysis”.

L712-713: statements such as “Many clupeids and crustaceans fall under high K category” require citations.

L737: thoughts on the possible mechanism of this relationship between resilience and geographic distribution? Is there evidence of such relationships from other studies?

L761: link to a citation or source or IUCN evaluations.

L766-767: what is meant by “evaluate its usefulness”? How was this done in the manuscript? You showed that it was possible to calculate an index, but I do not see an evaluation of usefulness.

L789-790: advantages/disadvantages of weighted and non-weighted approaches?

L801: seems that interpretation of this metric is thus relative to the fishery being studied. This has implications for comparing IRV to other indices.

L818: not following how 14 species are on the top-10 list.

L833: how often is this list revised, and could your work be used to help India reconsider which species to include on it?

L887: need to describe this “appropriate tool” in a little more detail, so readers can understand how these IRV values for multiple fisheries can be combined.

Reviewer #3: PONE-D-20-34956

General comments

The paper is a compilation of life history characteristics of fish in Indian waters that are important for fisheries and some evaluation of their potential resilience. It seems to follow on from a previous publication that looked at fewer species and metrics. Thus, the goals of the paper seem redundant with previous studies and the goals are not that clearly stated other than knowing resilience of fish is a good thing. The paper is therefore quite methodological and considerably less conceptual, hypothesis-driven and in presenting original findings. This may be fine for the journal PloSone. However, the organization of the paper is quite weak and this leads to low comprehension while reading. This is due to a mixture of things including mixing text that should go in various sections of a scientific paper. Much of the introduction is method, for example. The order is not great in the sense that many terms are not well defined and only presented as mathematical formulas late in the text. Many abbreviations and acronyms are used and not always that clear in text, tables, and figures. The English composition is also weak in many places in terms of the structure of presentation of information. The result is a text that is difficult to understand in terms of the potential importance and relevance to science and management. The paper might be better as a management report to the fisheries for information on developing fisheries policies. As a scientific paper, it is marginal. Some issue could be rectified but this will require considerable work on these and other issues.

Comments while reading

The title makes me wonder what are the attributes being evaluated as the abstract seems to be about fish less than fisheries.

Abstract

The abstract seems quite methodological and reports few results or concepts that might support some management need or scientific hypotheses. The authors say this method develops insights but we are not told what they are. I would suggest rewriting it to focus more on results and value to fisheries and climate disturbances.

L26- I am wondering what is the difference between vulnerability and risk for species? Risk assumes you know something about the frequency of disturbance. Any good reason to pick 10 species? Where does risk come in the methods and results?

L31 – the word shortened seems a poor word choice.

Introduction

Resilience or vulnerability are often specific to the disturbance. It is not that clear whether the disturbance here is fishing or climate and if this would make a differences. Can some text be used to make this clearer?

L56 – There are many more recent and thorough surveys of fish biomass that would seem appropriate to briefly review. The big criticisms of the Worm et al. 2009 paper was the lack of tropical fisheries data. So, this is a good place to argue for the originality of this paper.

P89 – it would be good to briefly say something about the spatial extent and habitats of this fisheries and boats. Is this within the EEZ or some other spatial scale? The species lists tell me this is pelagic and soft bottom species but this could be clearer to help the reader understand the fisheries environmental context.

P111 – this paragraph is not well referenced and it is not certain what habitats are being discussed here. It sounds like pelagic fisheries as many benthic fish have long lives for example.

P119 – this is an interesting finding and possibly one reason that some people are recommending gear rather than stock management. Would this be better in the discussion section?

The paper seems to be an update of species and some index of a previous study. Thus, the scientific value of the paper is limited. It seems more of an effort to increase the compilation of information of these fisheries.

Table 2 – I wonder if the information in this table would be more useful if organized by habitat or life histories or some other characteristic other than the alphabetical order of the families?

P119 – onward. Much of this text seems like methods in what is a long introduction that never is very clear about the scientific goals. I suggest a section in the methods section after the data and species description that summarizes the metrics in terms of their history and use in this paper. Otherwise, the introduction is too long and not clear.

L213- onward. The meanings of resilience, vulnerability, etc need to be defined earlier in the paper before presenting results.

Results

The results are very hard to follow because the legends are in the main text and the figures are at the end of the paper. There are also so many acronyms in the paper that this leads to poor comprehension.

The results and the redundancy of this with previous studies, suggests to me that maybe the authors should focus mostly what is original here, which I believe is the IRV index.

Table 3 comes before we know what resilience and vulnerability are and so it is unclear which of these variables belong to which metric.

Some of the text in the results seems to be more appropriate for the discussion section. That is when results are being compared to other studies.

Discussion

The discussion section is not that well organized both sub-headings and better English composition would help. That is better lead sentences on paragraphs and subsequent focused text.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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Submitted filename: PONE-D-20-34956_Review.pdf

Application of biological and fisheries attributes to assess the vulnerability and resilience of tropical marine fish species

PONE-D-20-34956R1

Dear Dr. Sathianandan,

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.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Even Moland

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

I encourage the authors to replace the two key words which are present in the title of the manuscript (resilience and vulnerability) and thus redundant as key words. Replacing these with other relevant key words will ensure increased searchability of the published paper. Suitable replacement key words for consideration could be e.g., 'Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM)' and 'fisheries dependent data'.