Here the reviewer(s) can mention 3-5 minor concerns that are not critical to the understanding and conclusions of the research, but would improve the overall flow or clarity of the manuscript. These concerns might include the following questions:
Were the methods sufficiently detailed to allow the experiments to be repeated?
Were the figures clear and logically arranged? Were the figure legends sufficiently detailed to allow the figures to be understood without reading the main text?
Are the figures representative of the data described in the results section?
Did the authors make all their associated data openly available (e.g. sequencing data, coding)?
Did the discussion address how their results move the field forwards?
Were the citations thorough or were key references missing?
1. When discussing disturbance frequencies and 'levels' throughout the manuscript, consistency of language is key. These different treatment 'levels' are misleading if described as disturbance levels since this description can be interpreted as disturbance intensity if not read carefully. Clarity of language surrounding disturbance manipulation is really important for specific understanding and placing the study in the wider context of studies of disturbance. We suggest changing 'levels' to frequency/ies' throughout - 'levels' does not appeal to a wider audience, and is currently only serving to reduce the manuscript's potential reach and impact.
2. We suggest including T0 data in the NMDS plot in Figure 1B. However, we were not able to understand why two different ordination methods were used in Figure 1 and suggest using only one method (NMDS or PCoA). The plot could be combined into one, if color represents disturbance frequency and shape represents time.
3. The frequency of measurements implies sampling with replacement (but this was not mentioned in the methods section), we would like to see a description of how replacement was achieved and discussion of what the impacts of replacement may have been. We are also interested in the implications of scaling up the microcosm size and varying initial conditions to reproduce and expand the experimental design for further work testing the new model.
4. Since the Results section appears before the Materials and Methods section in this manuscript, we suggest writing out the full names of abbreviated terms in the Results section so that readers can read sections in the order they appear and know what the abbreviations represent.
5. The 5. The symbols and colors chosen for the figures made it difficult to interpret the figures in many cases. For example, in figure 3 L4 and L6 are both represented by light grey squares that are very difficult to discern in the legend and are not visible in the plot (the plot may have been changed without updating the legend?). TOmake it easier to interpret figures, we suggest choosing one color scheme for all figures and keeping the colors for each disturbance level consistent throughout all figures. Additionally, if points are overlapping, we suggest increasing the alpha (transparency) of the points. Finally, it would be significantly easier and quicker to interpret the figures if legends were included in the colors chosen for the figures made it difficult to interpret the figures in many cases. For example, in figure 3 L4 and L6 are both represented by light grey squares that are very difficult to discern in the legend and are not visible in the plot (the plot may have been changes.
1) In Results section, line 115. We were a bit confused about the use of word "dispersion" as it has different meaning in island ecology. Dispersion in island ecology means (observed mean nearest neighbour distance)/(expected mean nearest neighbor distance), whereas in Figure 1 dispersion is used to represent PCoA analysis of relative bacterial abundance.
4) Although, at several points in the paper, the authors reference the softwares used, and sometimes, the corresponding parameters, we would encourage the authors to share both the raw data (the performance indicators in addition to the raw sequences, which are available on NCBI) and the accompanying code used to analyze it (github or similar site). In some cases the citations are missing for the relevant packages or software. Sharing the code would shed light on the details of some procedures that are not made explicit in the manuscript, and increase the reproducibility of the experiment.
This comment is unique to the preprint. The layout of the preprint, which we understand is likely the result of the requirements of a submission format, makes understanding the figures more difficult that necessary. For future preprint submissions, we encourage the authors to consider associating the figures with their titles and captions, and to put the figures inline, close to the relevant parts of the text.