PONE-D-24-11491Evaluation of an Autonomous Acoustic Surveying Technique for Grassland Bird Communities in NebraskaPLOS ONE

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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

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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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

Reviewer #2: 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: 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: General comments

This is a very interesting, well written manuscript. It is very clear, aims are nicely defined, methods are appropriate, and results reflect aims. Nonetheless, I found some minor issues, listed below, to be addressed before publishing.

Specific comments

Introduction

1. Lines 105-106: as I guess, did you monitor breeding birds? If yes, please, add this detail because could be wintering birds.

Study area

2. Line 124: replace “acoustic monitors” with “ARUs”

3. Lines 128-129: did you placed ARUs in all these grassland types? Or only in one of them? Please specified.

Sampling design

4. Line 142: remove “separate”

5. Did you used some detection radius to count birds or did you count birds with “unlimited” distance (so, all birds seen/heard also at great distance)?

6. Line 156: replace “acoustic monitors” with “ARUs”.

7. Line 158: replace “space” with “distance”

8. Lines 162-163: why? To avoid the edge effect? If yes, please add this fact to be more clear.

Evaluating BIRDNET performance

9. Line 272: replace “to comparing” with “to compare”

Figures

10. Lines 391 and 393: replace Fig. A and Fig. B with Panel A and Panel B.

Reviewer #2: I have read the study with pleasure. It is a really good and valuable paper examining the effectiveness of a completely automatic acoustic approach to bird monitoring. The authors proved that by applying soundscape recording and automatic detection of bird vocalizations using BirdNet, they achieve the same or better level of effectiveness as human observers. They have really well-planned the study, estimated the recall and precision of automatic detections, and manually confirmed the detection of each species by BirdNet. In my opinion, the study should be published after minor revision.

Minor comments below:

L56-63: You should also point out some limitations. The first one is that PAM focuses only on vocalizing animals, thus we assume that vocalizing animals reflect overall biodiversity. The next issue is unequal detection range for differently vocalizing species (depends on frequency and amplitude of vocalisation). Additionally, biodiversity is not all; species abundance is also important but difficult to catch by PAM.

L99-104: The BirdNet does not detect signals on its own but compares the time period (3 sec) with the template. Thus, we may expect that the effectiveness of bird detection by BirdNet may differ between different bird communities and may vary depending on the time of day or season. Therefore, it is important to test the effectiveness of BirdNet under various ecological conditions. Your study does this, which is why it is important.

L123: Please provide more information about the timing of the breeding season within your study area. Additionally, could you share some basic information about species richness?

L159: Did you check the microphones before recording? Which gain setting did you apply?

L222: Is it not too low sample size obtain a good estimation of recall? Especially for rare or low-vocalizing species, you will get no detections.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Evaluation of an Autonomous Acoustic Surveying Technique for Grassland Bird Communities in Nebraska

PONE-D-24-11491R1

Dear Dr. Schuster,

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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Additional Editor Comments (optional):

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

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

Reviewer #2: 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)

Reviewer #2: The authors considered all my comments and suggestions. I recommend publication of the manuscript. Congratulations on a really good paper!

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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