Content of review 1, reviewed on May 01, 2020

The Python package presented in the paper is interesting and for sure it will be used a lot by researchers working with such topics.
I am a bit sceptical on how it is presented at the moment in the paper. I feel that the paper in the current form is not useful for neither the remote sensing community and neither the ecology one. I mean that for a person inside the topic there are too few information to make it interesting, and for an ecologist that never used such algorithms is probably too technical and too less connected to ecological problems to make it interesting. The package is described at high level and it is not clear how to use it, and the algorithms implemented are not fully explained. On the other site each case study is treated separately without a deep comparison with existing packages in terms of both results and computing performances. An organic discussion of the pros and cons of the package in the different biomes is missing. Moreover the structure of the paper is very different from what is the structure required by this journal in the guides for authors.
In my view the package is worth to be presented in a paper but maybe with two separate papers: a technical one that deeply describes algorithms and usage, and an application one where it is showed how this package can be a useful tool to answer to ecological questions.

Source

    © 2020 the Reviewer.

References

    G., W. B., Sergio, M., Melaine, A., Gregoire, V., Henry, S., P., W. E. 2020. DeepForest: A Python package for RGB deep learning tree crown delineation. Methods in Ecology and Evolution.