Dear authors,
Your article ‘Mapping butterfly species richness and abundance in mountain grasslands – spatial application of a biodiversity indicator’ presents a valuable framework for modelling the abundance and species richness of butterflies based on remote sensing data. Your introduction does a great job in introducing the research gaps, with a particularly focus on the limited availability of spatially and temporally continuous distribution and abundance data. I also highly acknowledge the breath of approaches and methodological detail that support your results. The methods seem appropriate and provide a detailed picture. Having said this, I would recommend including a figure that presents the modeling and evaluation framework as flowchart to aid overview - particularly as you suggest and want to facilitate its broader application. I think this is a very interesting cases study for an approach that is indeed of broader relevance. The article is generally well-written but would benefit from greater clarity in the introduction and discussion. Both the discussion and introduction can benefit from additional support and improved focus on the core topic of these study. For instance, many of the species-level application mentioned in the dedicated section are to general and not helpful in highlighting the scientific advances of the study and the introduction broadens too much with topics like ecosystem services or the impacts of pesticides. Also, although it is difficult in this research area to come up with detailed. Nevertheless, I highly recommend sharpening the hypothesis section at the end of the introduction to better guide the readers expectations. The item captions need more detail and generally do not suffice for understanding the presented results without reference to the main text. Some of the figure and particularly the formatting of the tables needs to be improved. I consider these issues to be rather minor and think that the article is suitable for DDI once they are addressed and clarified.

Please see my detailed responses below:
L7-8: Specify e.g. by adding ’precise’ before insights. Otherwise its sentence is somewhat vague… sure something can give insights. Also consider adding ‘at a scale relevant for management and conservation action’
L10-11: Improve clarity for your aim. Something along the lines: ‘Applying this approach, we predict the and evaluate the…. In addition, based on the best-fit model we investigate the scale of effect as well as the drivers of butterfly species richness and abundance…’
L19: Maybe use resolution or grain in the introduction and discussion.
L18-20: To asses the influence…. And to determine the scale at which they explain species richness and abundance best, models with different predcitor grain were fitted and evaluated.
L23: Please indicate which measure was used (Pearson, Spearman; spatially corrected?)
L50: This goes in the right direction but I would stress that this is needed to guide management and conservation action. Also please keep in mind that small scale may also refer to a small extent, which is I think not your intented focus, rather consider referring to high-resolution or management relevant scales more to underscore your point.
L59: I think I get what you mean but I think the phrasing is somewhat unclear and I don't think this is a strong argument. Again, action and management require high-resolution and temporally contentious distribution data, but do we really critically need that to assess e.g. the role of insects for pollination?
L63: 'are therefore patchy' ... this also extends to continuity in time, which I would highlight here already. This part is very important to pitch your topic s I would rather extend on this. Also consider referencing the EVB framework (Jetz et al., 2019, Nat. Ecol. Evol.)
L75: It would be useful to cite the preprint by Pinkert et al. (Nat. Ecol. Evol.) here and in fact in several other places where you refer to the role of mountains for butterfly diversity and the global diversity patterns.
L78: Not sure where this argument is going? Either incorporate into the following paragraph, where you discuss local constraints and the role of plants for butterfly distributions or remove. To me this sounds as if you are raising this topic to implicitly highlight an advantage of the study. Specifically, the use of larval occurrences.
L80: add a dot after the brackets.
L83: Another case where it would be useful to reference the big picture (Pinkert et al. from before)
L89: Here or somewhere later where you specifically address elevational diversity gradients: It would be relevant to limit this to certain groups and provide more detail on expected clines for instance based on Peters et al. (2016, Nat. Commun.)
L95: I am missing detail on the response variables for butterflies in this paragraph. Please specifically refer to species richness, abundance and distribution where appropriate. This sentence may end for instance with: ‘shaping distribution-abundance dynamics’. For me stating that ectotherms (insects) are more temperature dependent than endotherms alone doesn't add much. In the context of your study, you may want to stress that this impacts species' abundance and distribution (see e.g. Pinkert et al. 2020, Ecology)
L101: At this point in the introduction I wonder if will really address factors like pollution, disturbance, land-use and soil properties in a conclusive analysis framework. If not reduce the description of factors to those you think can best be interfered with remote sensing data and also provide respective citations for the surrogacy.
L104: landuse ~ community effects have been mentioned in the pervious paragraph. So one may wonder that site factors means in this context. Maybe it helps to restructure the text discussing environmental drivers and land-use drivers with two distinct paragraphs.
After reading the paragraph several times and together with the info provided in the abstract, I believe this text was intended as a discussion of the "scale of effect". If so, please clarify early on.
L116: This implies we already know the relevant scale, but isn't that something you wanted to infer based on your results? Please explain or rephrase.
L118: Explore the possibility of modeling? Not a good motivation/aim all together. Rather you intent to develop a frame work for modeling fine-scale richness and abundance of butterflies based on survey data to inform about drivers and the scale of effect. More generally you want to exemplify the integration of remote sensing data to improve the spatial and temporal resolution and continuity of data to aid management and conservation action.
L125-132: These are general questions, but to conclude you would need to state specific predictions for your study system based on the above-mentioned hypothesis/mechanisms. For instance regarding (4) you may suggest a scale that is most relevant. Regarding (3) you should already have an idea if species richness and abundance increase/decrease with landuse intensity (or what you mean with landscape factors) as well as how topography (elevation?, topographical heterogeneity?) affect species richness and abundance.
L140: integrate the last part directly into the sentence, instead of the ':...'
L159-164: Unclear links between the two sentences. I get the point that you included disproportionately (area-wise) fewer sites because of the large extent of this stratum but the first sentence reads as if there are many habitats and species and the second reads as if there are fewer species. Please clarify.
L168: also mention the years in L156
L189: I thought that would be a case where you later on use genital analysis. Are you trying to say it was still not possible to reliably differentiate the mentioned species pairs, so you included them as complexes?
L201, L206 and throughout the methods: Please provide references for the packages containing the respective functions.
L238: To me a r-value of 0.52 is not strong, but rather moderate but refer to common threshold for interpretation and use them consistently. To be honest I would jut leave that to the reader and hence state the value without interpretation.
L240: Avoid the term 'significantly' as we usually report non-significant effects as 'did not effect' and significant effects as 'affected/ was correlated with'
L243: remove extra dot and space
L254: 'Table 2'
L251: 'across' instead of 'over'
L355: 'for all models'
L366: rather here you may state 'with very promising results'.
L402: Consider renaming this section to something like 'Drivers of species richness and abundance'. Please mind my above comment on the use of 'significant'
L475: These points are all valid, but I would like to see more explanation of how you potentially addressed them. Most adult butterflies are not directly dependent on a certain plant, but larvae are. On the other hand, for oviposition adult butterflies would for course select sites with their larval host plants. There is quite some evidence (see the study on Swiss butterflies from above; Ecology paper) that host plant distributions provide the template for butterfly distributions (adults) while environmental factors shape the structure therein and also host plant distributions. So I think it would be good to explain that incorporating vegetation your tried to grasp effects of butterfly-host plant interactions on species' distribution and abundance with your approach. You can always argue that the models miss some factors but also highlight how much they already explain if you raise these general issues.
L488: Add reference. Pinkert et al. has the alps as hotspot of butterfly species richness.
505-507: The same variable in a standard SDM would perform even better so you would need to specify for what it could do a better job. Intuitively I would focus here an abundance but you were less confident with interpreting your abundance results so it is maybe not a good move to highlight this application. I would focus your discussion of application to community-level predictions instead of species predictions. From top to bottom this paragraph becomes increasingly loosely related to your findings/achievements/actual selling points
L508-509: The first part of the sentence is unclear. Please rephrase.
Table 1 and others: There should be no cell borders. Add only a horizontal line below the header row and the last row. In the header of column 2 it should read 'for'
Table 3: Some of the tables would be better presented as text in the results. For these few values a table is not well justified.
Figure 2: please also define the grey area in the legend. Also, I can't find the figure captions. If the one-liner below the figure is the entire caption, you would need to add details on the number of site and species used for modeling, the model framework etc.
Appendix: In many cases I feel the captions do not contain sufficient detail to understand their content independent from the text. Please improve and present every item (table or figure) on a separate page.