PONE-D-24-04716Coexistence from a lion’s perspective: movements and habitat selection by African lions (Panthera leo) across a multi-use landscapePLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

First I want to apologize for the time it took to provide a decision on this manuscript, as it was challenging to find reviewers for it. The manuscript addresses an important topic and uses well-established techniques to accomplish its stated goals. The reviewers are generally supportive of the manuscript proceeding to publication, provided that some relatively major revisions are made, most substantively clarifying methodology and acknowledging sample sizes used. I also agree with Reviewer 1 that some of the figures are redundant in the main manuscript because they present relatively similar information.

In addition to their comments, please better clarify the classification of male lions in nomadic vs. resident - what thresholds were used to assign the individuals to one of these categories? E.g. how many days minimum did a male lion need to spend with a pride of females for it to be classified as resident? What type of interactions did the male need to have with the females and how did the different criteria factor in the classification? For example, how does a male that spent 30 days with a group of females but did not mate with them compare to a male that spent 3 days with the female but mated with them? Having clearly defined criteria would help not only this study but also classifications in future studies by other authors.

In the Methods you describe that local community members collected spatial data on water availability (river, springs, dams etc.). Please clarify if all these data were included in the modelling procedure. It appears that only distance to river was used for modelling, why not use all data that were collected? Especially given that you state rivers tend to be seasonal, whereas presumably the point water features are mostly permanent year-round.

There is a statement in the manuscript that in lion populations males are the ones that are important for connectivity, I would suggest nuancing this statement as females can also disperse although generally shorter distances. I am not suggesting running the resistance analysis on females also, but I do think that it would be important to mention in the text that females may also play a role in connectivity although perhaps less prominent than males.

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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: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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: 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: Dear,

I have read the manuscript entitled “Coexistence from a lion’s perspective: movements and habitat selection by African lions (Panthera leo) across a multi-use landscape”. The study presents an analysis of lion habitat selection at two scales (landscape and local) in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, as a function of human activity, in a conservation context aiming at reduce human-lion conflict. The manuscript is interesting and well written, the habitat selection methods are correctly applied, and I think it deserves to be published, despite the small sample size in each lion category (the authors can acknowledge this point in the discussion).

I think the method section deserves some clarifications, see my numerous minor comments along these lines below. Specifically, the authors should specify whether they scaled their continuous variables before running the SSF because of a risk of statistical problems for subsequent analyses, and justify why the resistance map varied between -1 and 1 (I don’t understand how is it possible with the current justification). I also strongly recommend to delete the Figure 5, which is redundant to Figure 3A and very misleading. To improve the general clarity of the manuscript, I suggest to improve figure presentation by shading non-significant results and facilitate a quick interpretation. In addition, the discussion is a little long and could be shortened and structured with sub-headings.

Minor comments:

L27. Replace « adaptations » by « adjustments ».

L131. Correct for “12 persons/km²”.

L280. I don’t think you run RSF and SSF with suncalc package. Please reformulate the sentence.

L284. Refer to the logistic regression in the section.

L293. Probably a mistake formulation here. There is no strata in a RSF. Muff et al. also recommend to use random slope coefficients to account for inter-individual variability in habitat selection, and weighted availability.

L298-300. The SSF definition is almost not understandable. I suggest something like “For SSF modelling, each observed step is paired with X random steps, resulting in a stratified dataset.”

L340. You have not mentioned that you scaled the continuous variables before adjusting the SSF. You cannot apply the regression coefficients to the new scaled variable if the coefficients were previously estimated using an unscaled variable.

L342-349. And what about the day/night differences?

L370. “In lieu of…” ? Maybe reformulate for “In absence of…”

L372-373. Add the distance unit.

L372-376. Add a Table presenting the regression summary in Appendix. Without information on the reference category for each categorical covariable, it is not possible to evaluate this part.

L388. What does the error bar represent?

L393-399. Delete.

L419. What does the error bar represent?

L425-426. Delete.

L432-433. Specify the chosen distance.

L433-438. Delete.

L442. Specify the value of the mean levels of cover (to the reader have a better idea of the local conditions).

L442-444. This results is also true for dry season. Unless you wish to state “both resident and nomadic males were significantly less likely to select locations closer to human activity during the wet season than dry season“. Authors should be clearer in their presentation of the results, specifying the basis for comparison. Verify also the rest of the manuscript.

L458-459. Results are already complex to follow due to crossing information on season, time of day and sex, and a little long. I suggest to delete this sentence (and maybe some others) to reduce a bit. To make it easier to read, I also suggest shading non-significant results in grey on the figures 2 and 3.

L462. I suggest to delete the Figure 5. Figure 5 is redundant with Figure 3A, although it shows the exponential of the estimates. In addition, all the explanations in this figure are redundant with the previous results section. You also use RSS to calculate map resistance only for nomadic males and at both seasons, but Figure 5 shows the results for the 3 lion categories without seasonal distinction, which is very misleading.

L481-484. Delete.

L486. Avoid to interpret result in the legend of the Figure 6 L490 and L491-494.

Figure 6. I don’t understand how the index of map resistance can range between -1 and 1, if it calculated from equation L358. The sum should vary between 0 and +inf

L499. Replace “regions” by “areas”.

L553-557. I’m not sure to correctly understand the justification for an artifact. Please reformulate.

L619-621. Do you have an idea of the number of lions killed annually?

L622-624. Can you develop an example in one sentence?

L633. Replace “adaptations” by “adjustments”.

The reviewer.

Reviewer #2: This paper makes great effort to improve our understanding of lion landscape and small-scale space use in the proximity of humans. Such an effort is commendable, and I support the publication of this work. However, I would like to make a couple of suggestions that might improve the manuscript.

The first issue that I would like to see captured in the text is a summarised version of Supplementary information S1. I think it is important that the reader is made aware that for resident males approximately 130 months of resident male data came from 8 animals and that almost half of the data came from only two animals. It is also important to note that 190 months of female data comes from 8 different animals but here more than half of the data are from only two animals. For the nomadic males 117 months of data were obtained from 9 animals but more than half of the data is from only 3 animals. By no means do I want to belittle the amount of effort and resources that went into obtaining the data used, but the question remains on how representative it is for all female, resident, and nomadic lions if for each group most of the data is from two or three individuals. I think this need to be explicitly shown and discussed. I do not think it change the conclusions, but the overall interpretation of results needs to be seen in this context. It will be interesting to see how well model results compare when the 2 or 3 key animals’ data are removed form the data set and the models re-run on the remaining data. A comparison between the full and partial model outcomes might be very revealing, but I do not insist on this for publication of this paper. Just please acknowledge the potential influence the individual preference of 2 or 3 key individuals could potentially have on the results.

The 2nd issue is the wild prey abundance issue. You recognise that an accurate idea of wild prey availability it is a crucial point of investigation for future studies but then you conclude that is important based on the assumption that EVI and season is correlated to wild prey abundance. This correlation might be true in the west on the short grass plains, but I am not convinced it holds for the entire area. My suggestion is to simply remove any text that try and correlate wet/dry season and EVI to prey abundance or at best state that it might be correlated. I made comments in text about this.

Another issue is that you deduct that lions do not need to predate on livestock during the wet season but that is in direct contradiction to the findings of a recent paper from the Tsavo area in Kenya. It might be worth having a look at the paper of Olivier, I. R., Tambling, C. J., Müller, L. & Radloff, F. G. T. (2023). Lion (Panthera leo) diet and cattle depredation on the Kuku Group Ranch Pastoralist area in southern Maasailand, Kenya. Wildlife Research, 50(4): 310-324.

A last point that is probably not necessary to address and might deviate a bit from the focus of the paper is the issue of retaliation and traditional killing of lion. In this and other East African landscapes, a landscape of fear exists for lion, you indirectly acknowledge this, created by the episodic killing of lion and the fashion within which this is done (I am not referring to poisoning but the active pursuit of lion by red clad men with spears). I often wonder how long it will take lion to lose there deep fear of Masai people when this practise is completely abandoned and following on this, how long it will take for lions to start killing people in a much higher frequency that is currently the case. Once that starts to happen this “co-existence” idea might not be all that feasible anymore as losing livestock is very different from losing human lives. I am thus of opinion that a more nuanced approach to retaliation and traditional killings is needed although I also at the same time understand the resentment for the cruelty involved.

Please find attached some minor comments in the accompanying file and good luck in getting this published.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PONE-D-24-04716_reviewed.pdf

Coexistence from a lion’s perspective: movements and habitat selection by African lions (Panthera leo) across a multi-use landscape

PONE-D-24-04716R1

Dear Dr. Jansson,

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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Academic Editor

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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

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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: (No Response)

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

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

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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: (No Response)

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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: (No Response)

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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: Dear,

Thank you for your thorough review of the manuscript and to have reanalyzed the statistical models. Authors have correctly include my recommendations. The ms is now clear and ready for publication.

I have just few minor comments. The line numbers are based on the manuscript in track change mode:

- L198: A parenthesis is missing

- L365: Correct for "with weight set at 1000 for random locations and..."

- L 512: Did you say "diel periods" rather than "dies periods"?

- L618-619 and 623-625 are partially redundant.

Sincerely,

The Reviewer

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Reviewer #1: No

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