PONE-D-23-35757Elevated fish densities extend kilometres from oil and gas platformsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Lawrence,

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. The manuscript presents a clear analysis of how fish densities vary with distance from oil platforms and pipelines.  There are important findings which will stimulate much interest and new studies.  Overall the manuscript is organized and clearly presented.  The reviewers have some comments, which are mostly of a technical/clarifying nature and should be relatively straightforward to accommodate.  Please adjust according to these comments.  I agree with reviewer 1 that the Figure S1 and Table S1 could be included in the main manuscript.

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Reviewers' comments:

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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: Line 158: corrected depth please clarify

Line 187: please name the ICES data portal

Page 13: I would prefer to include the Figure and Table from the Supplementary material here in the main MS

Line 283: visual inspection of the variograms or formal test ?

Line 333: what about the dead zone at the surface? Was a drop keel used?

Line 355: Sediment maps for the North Sea should be available from geological surveys or projects

Page 18: Please mention that the results and conclusions may warrant a validity check with an additional data set, e.g. from quarter 1 survey or another year or a special study with bottom and pelagic trawl catches in addition to the acoustics

Reviewer #2: Overall a nice paper. The authors have done considerable work to address fish distribution and proximity to platforms. I think the manuscript could be strengthened by the addition of a couple of analyses that should not be too arduous to complete. I provide more detail in general comment #4 and specific comment #22. My recommendation is major revisions.

General Comments:

Lines 17-19. I find this statement interesting. Is the assumption that the authors are referring to the pelagic environment, rather than the benthic and/or demersal environments? If so, I don’t quite agree that the pelagic is featureless (and I don’t understand the use of “relatively”. Relative to what?). I think there are features, but we as humans either don’t understand them and consequently don’t measure them, or choose to ignore them. If the benthic habitat is to be considered, then I really don’t agree with it being featureless. I think this statement needs more detail and clarification.

An echogram would be very useful to give perspective and context.

I wasn’t sure how day/night fit into the analyses. The results state day/night differences, but were the data separated into day & night prior to applying statistics or was day/night a covariate? For example, Figure S1 shows only one trend line per graph, suggesting the data were pooled day & night, but if there were day/night differences, shouldn’t there be two graphs per test?

Was it possible to calculate fish length from the TS measurements? It would be very interesting to see if there were any relationships between fish length and proximity to platforms.

Specific Comments:

Line 20. There is still considerable debate about “spill over”. I would temper this statement with “potentially”.

Line 79. Delete “very”.

Line 90. Please define what “the region” refers to. The authors have referred to a number of different regions around the globe. Maybe rewrite to “... platforms throughout the North Sea.” if they are only referring to the North Sea.

Line 106. Please provide the beam widths. This is important information for some of the processing steps.

Line 110. Should the comma after “performed” be a colon?

Line 112. Was there a backstep applied to the seabed echo detection?

Lines 123-124. Is there a reference for “harder edges”?

Lines 124-126. Please state how the “area around each candidate school” was selected.

Line 139. Please state which dimension each value refers to, e.g., 50 m horizontal by 5 m vertical.

Line 141. Please define “masked”.

Line 143. What type of trawl was used? If a bottom trawl, do the authors suspect a bias in the TS calculations for pelagic scattering? For example, juvenile gadoids are often in the water column, whereas adults are demersal. Using a TS for adults would not be representative of the individuals in the water column.

Lines 166-168. I recommend the authors look at Kieser and Mulligan, 1984, Analysis of echo counting data: A model, Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, 41: 451-458 as a method to estimate echo count density.

Line 187. A URL to the ICES data portal would be useful.

Line 191. What were the criteria for day and night from sun elevation?

Line 204. “Data” is plural. Replace “was” with “were”.

Line 229. “Gaussian” should be capitalized.

Line 238. Specify which analyses. In the previous section, data >25 km were used for the baseline.

Table 1 vs. Figure S1. I like the figure over the table. I feel the figure is more informative than the table, so I suggest replacing Table 1 with Figure S1.

Paragraph beginning on line 270. I would like to see a figure representing the spatial autocorrelation. This could be in the supporting documentation.

Line 292. The validity of this paragraph is impossible to evaluate without any statistical test, results, or figures. Either provide details or delete.

The discussion should include a paragraph on seasonality and migration behaviour. It would be interesting to know how their survey timing fits into the overall distribution of the key species.

The discussion should also cover pelagic vs. demersal distributions. I didn’t see anywhere in the analyses where scattering depth was considered. It would be very interesting to know if depth distributions changed with proximity to platforms.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Elevated fish densities extend kilometres from oil and gas platforms

PONE-D-23-35757R1

Dear Dr. Lawrence,

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,

Brian R. MacKenzie, Ph. D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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