The manuscript “Biodiversity underpins fisheries resilience to exploitation in Earth’s largest river basin” aimed to examine taxonomic and trait-based signatures of exploitation in inland fish landings, as well as implications of changing biodiversity for fisheries resilience. The manuscript is well written, timely and supported by a robust database. It also has important implications for the conservation of the Amazon fish fauna. The main results are: even at low exploitation rates, maintaining harvests results in changes in the diversity of exploited fish, and the resiliency of harvests to ongoing exploitation depends primarily on the initial number of exploitable species.
I point out only few minor changes to be considered by the authors.
The Jaccard dissimilaty index was used (appropriately) for estimating temporal betta diversity, but the results were interpreted as “species turnover”. However, Jaccard dissimilarity could indicate both turnover or nestedness. Investigation which mechanism (turnover or nestedness) underpins beta diversity would further support the discussion.
The figure 4 lacks a confidence interval. I would also chance such figure by the Figure S5 (incorporating the confidence interval);
There is some literature on the effects of urban markets on selectivity, with a significantly lower species diversity in commercial compared to subsistence catches (e.g. doi.org/10.1590/1982-0224-2021-0097) that could be incorporated in the discussion.