A Review of Coastal Anthropogenic Impacts on Mytilid Mussel Beds: Effects on Mussels and Their Associated Assemblages

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review of manuscript diversity-1708257 A review of coastal anthropogenic impacts on Mytilid mussel beds: Effects on mussels and their associated assemblages.

Recommendations

Major revision

Overview and general comments

The overall aim of the manuscript is to provide a review of the anthropogenic impacts on Mytilid mussel beds and the diversity of their associated assemblages in coastal environments. In general, I appreciate the authors effort. However, my main object to this manuscript is the continuous use of very long sentences with many subordinated clauses which becomes very difficult to read and I found myself needing to re-read the same sentence multiple times to understand what the authors tried to say. I’m not saying that it is grammatically wrong but for the reader it become too much and I strongly recommend that the authors try to re-write large parts of the text to make it more straight forward and getting a better flow in the text. A secondary thing is that for me it sounds very strange that there is no single article on this subject which have been performed during the last decade, or at least perform sampling during this ten year. Looking at table 1 which presents the articles included in this review the latest sampling occurring in any of these articles were performed in 2012.

AS mentioned, I appreciate the authors effort but at the moment the manuscript is a bit fragmented and I think it would have benefited from a narrower focus (e.g. single area, single/few impacts etc) to provide a more in-depth reasoning. If keeping the wide aspect of the review I believe that the author needs to better lift similarities/differences between areas/anthropogenic impact/species etc in the synthesis to provide a more complete picture

Detailed comments

Table 1 need to be adjusted so that words in the headings and text int the columns are not divided across two rows unless a hyphen is used.  Also why is table 1 separated into two parts when the first part I divided across two pages anyway. If divided it should be done to have each part in a single page.

the paper the authors discuss on R317-320, there is no mentioning on  anything to do with diversity and based on the authors own  discussion on how they limited the articles included I don’t see why this article were included.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Overview and general comments

The overall aim of the manuscript is to provide a review of the anthropogenic impacts on Mytilid mussel beds and the diversity of their associated assemblages in coastal environments. In general, I appreciate the authors effort. However, my main object to this manuscript is the continuous use of very long sentences with many subordinated clauses which becomes very difficult to read and I found myself needing to re-read the same sentence multiple times to understand what the authors tried to say. I’m not saying that it is grammatically wrong but for the reader it become too much and I strongly recommend that the authors try to re-write large parts of the text to make it more straight forward and getting a better flow in the text. A secondary thing is that for me it sounds very strange that there is no single article on this subject which have been performed during the last decade, or at least perform sampling during this ten year. Looking at table 1 which presents the articles included in this review the latest sampling occurring in any of these articles were performed in 2012.

We have re-write many parts of the manuscript to make it more straightforward and get a better flow as recommended by both referees. Regarding the lack of recent articles about the topic, we can only say that none the search or the exploration of grey literature provide useful papers after 2012. We hope that this review helps to stimulate more studies about this topic.

As mentioned, I appreciate the authors effort but at the moment the manuscript is a bit fragmented and I think it would have benefited from a narrower focus (e.g. single area, single/few impacts etc) to provide a more in-depth reasoning. If keeping the wide aspect of the review I believe that the author needs to better lift similarities/differences between areas/anthropogenic impact/species etc in the synthesis to provide a more complete picture

We think that considering the limited number of papers available for this revision and the great geographical dispersion of these studies, it is impossible to do a review with a narrower focus on any area or impact. We have tried to improve the synthesis section. In the second paragraph you can see general effects of the studied impacts on the macrofauna assemblages. In other cases, generalization is not easy to achieve. For example, for recovery after disturbance, there are few studies dealing with different disturbances.

Detailed comments

Table 1 need to be adjusted so that words in the headings and text int the columns are not divided across two rows unless a hyphen is used.  Also why is table 1 separated into two parts when the first part I divided across two pages anyway. If divided it should be done to have each part in a single page.

We have revised the whole table and change the format to avoid similar problems in this second submission.

the paper the authors discuss on R317-320, there is no mentioning on anything to do with diversity and based on the authors own discussion on how they limited the articles included I don’t see why this article were included.

The referee is right and that part was removed.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Editors,

Paper proposed by Sampaio et al. is a valuable and well organised compilation of up to date knowledge on anthropogenic impacts on mytilid mussel beds encompassing both effects on mussels themselves and on their associated assemblages. Mussel beds are important and rich habitats subject to changes and decline due to the different anthropogenic activities and need to be monitored. The present paper will be a good starting reference point for the future monitoring studies.

The paper is clear and well organised, English language is appropriate although writing style could be improved, and adequate references were used. I propose some minor changes:

• I propose to organize main chapters in a more classical way, which would give smoother readability to the paper: "Introduction", "Materials and methods", "Results and Discussion" and "Conclusions".
• Writing style should be improved. Some sentences are too long containing more than one concepts, thus complicated and hard to comprehend. I suggest to authors to split some long sentences in two or three simpler. Moreover some parts of the text should be written in a smoother and more scientifically  soundy way. For example: "in the East Pacific, it was found a decline in the biomass of the mussel C. grayanus due to poaching". It is better to say: "in the East Pacific, biomass of the mussel C. grayanus declined due to poaching." Please correct all similar cases throughout the text.
• Other suggestions are incorporated within the manuscript

Sincerely

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The paper is clear and well organised, English language is appropriate although writing style could be improved, and adequate references were used. I propose some minor changes:

• I propose to organize main chapters in a more classical way, which would give smoother readability to the paper: "Introduction", "Materials and methods", "Results and Discussion" and "Conclusions".

Thank you very much for your consideration. Instructions to authors of the journal state that for structured reviews like this the proposed manuscript structure is possible. However, we think that the section of the paper is more descriptive than the general (introduction, material and methods, etc.,) and remarks that this paper is a review and not a research paper.

• Writing style should be improved. Some sentences are too long containing more than one concepts, thus complicated and hard to comprehend. I suggest to authors to split some long sentences in two or three simpler. Moreover, some parts of the text should be written in a smoother and more scientifically soundy way. For example: "in the East Pacific, it was found a decline in the biomass of the mussel C. grayanus due to poaching". It is better to say: "in the East Pacific, biomass of the mussel C. grayanus declined due to poaching." Please correct all similar cases throughout the text.

We have revised the whole text trying to correct style and English problem identified by both referees.

• Other suggestions are incorporated within the manuscript

We have followed all the suggestions proposed within the manuscript. About the suggestion done in table 1 regarding alien species, we have included it in the Literature section. In the section about Anthropogenic perturbations, we noticed the interaction with alien species when necessary. However, we did not include a detailed discussion about this topic, because we think is out of the scope of this revision.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Overview and general comments

I appreciate the authors efforts so far and the text is much improved in terms of readability and Table 1 have a much nice appearance now. However, I suggest going through the English a bit as I find the sentence construction a bit strange in some cases before it can be accepted. Some examples are give in the detailed comments below.

I still think it is strange that there is no single article on this subject (anthropogenic impacts on Mytilid mussel beds) performed during the last decade. But, I cannot argue against the authors in terms of if there are any articles available or not since I have not had time to do a deeper search into the literature at this moment. I just have to trust the authors even if it sound strange with no literature on the subject in the last 10 years. Specially since biodiversity and anthropogenic impact as well as mussel beds have been the subject of many studies in the past.

Detailed comments

Line 312:  “to clean a shore can have sometimes a more sever impact”  suggested to change to “ to clean a shore can sometimes have a more severe impact”

Line 331-332: strange language

Line 407: Coincided with instead of coincidently with

Line 554: replace vagile with mobile

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We have done all the corrections proposed by the referee in the new version of the manuscript. Thank you very much for your help in improving our manuscript.