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closeReferee Comments: Referee 2(Mark-Oliver Roedel)
Posted by PLOS_ONE_Group on 08 Nov 2007 at 17:45 GMT
Reviewer 2's Review
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The authors present an interesting genetic approach to estimate cryptic species diversity. Based on genetic distances (16S mrDNA) they conclude for the Amazonian part of the Guianas that more than double the number of the currently recognized frog species should exists, a conclusion that quite certainly has very profound impact on various scientific fields, such as conservation biology, biogeography, and of course systematics and taxonomy. It is hence a valuable contribution to PLoSONE. The paper is well structured, written in a way that the content is easily accessible and data collection and analyses are sufficiently explained and done in a sound way.
One more important point for the Conclusions: could you identify particular regions with many candidate species? Regions that right now would be outside areas or particular conservation concern (i.e. hotspots, large wilderness areas etc.) and hence can you show that your results would be directly applicable for conservation measures? Only documenting species richness before it vanishes is a poor goal. Better aim to improve conservation activities in a way that so far undetected areas of endemicity or high species richness are detected and may come into focus of conservationists (even when the taxa in question do not yet have scientific and hence legally applicable names).
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N.B. These are the general comments made by the reviewer when reviewing this paper in light of which the manuscript was revised. Specific points addressed during revision of the paper are not shown.
RE: Referee Comments: Referee 2(Mark-Oliver Roedel)
afo23 replied to PLOS_ONE_Group on 12 Nov 2007 at 09:33 GMT
Our sampling is manly focusing on the Guiana shield. The other part of the data we used in this paper is mainly from Genebank, sequences which are mainly coming from specimens sampled in western Amazonia. We definitely would have like to be able to compare the pattern among different areas across South America and especially across Amazonia but the genetic data are unfortunately still too scarce to be able to do it. We have been able to make a comparison Guiana shield VS Amazonia but any other more structured analysis would have been hazardous given the data available for most Amazonian biogeographic sub-regions. However, the result of this comparison reveals both the deeply independent evolutionary history of the Guiana shield for some lineages and the fact that dispersal-vicariance events occurred many times between different regions of Amazonia for other lineages. These preliminary observations are strongly suggesting that a great quantity of data would be needed to have comparable estimates of the “diversity” in biogeographic sub-regions of Amazonia. However the method we proposed can be an efficientent and quick way to obtain an estimation of the diversity in different part of Amazonia and the mean to compare them. Then this would be valuable information for the conservation of Amazonian biota.