I have not reviewed this manuscript in its previous round of reviews. The study aims to disentangle the mechanisms through which disturbances (here drying) affect river community recovery. Very few studies have addressed how disturbance extent and location may affect diversity patterns in spatially structure ecosystems such as river networks. The modelling approach presented here is one of the first step necessary to understand the mechanisms through which the alteration of connectivity by disturbances may affect the community recovery of organisms with different dispersal strategies. The manuscript is very pleasant to read and the modelling approach seems robust. Most of my comments aim at improving clarity and the terminology. Some justification on your recovery metric and the statistical tests used may also be needed.

As a general comment: I would reconsider your use of “drying intensity” to describe a variable that represent “drying spatial extent”. Intensity is a vague term and I would suggest you to use a more specific term such as spatial extent. Elsewise, you should clearly define what you mean by intensity from the introduction.

L11: This sounds like the organisms act on patch connectivity… Rephrase e.g. local communities of flying organisms recovered faster/more efficiently from drying than organisms with strictly aquatic dispersal due to their capacity to overcome hydrological connectivity loss… or something along those lines…

L14: “patch location”? Shouldn’t it be drying/disturbance location?

L51: This was already mentioned L21. You might want here (or after line 60) to add a few sentences (two-three) on the importance of disturbance spatial extent (see e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fevo.2018.00224/full) and location on community/metacommunity responses. These two aspects of disturbances are central in your study but their effect on metacommunity dynamic is barely mentioned. For example, why would you expect different responses if a disturbance occurs in headwaters, downstream or at random?

L60 What are metacommunity networks? “Metacommunity dynamics” or “community assembly mechanisms” might be clearer?

L62 Is perception the right term? “and the importance of landscape connectivity in determining their metacommunities strongly differ among those”

L77 communities being likely less resilient

L84-86: this hypothesis is unclear. We expect recovery to differ between dispersal modes because of differences in their capacity to overcome losses of patch connectivity?

L142: A reference would be good here.

L172: please, specify that each parameter combinations were repeated three times and not only for control perennial conditions.

L175-178: Why comparing richness and not community composition? Using richness to estimate community recovery may be a bit simplistic. I do not specifically expect you to modify your metric but some justifications would be needed I think.

L179-181: you might also want to define “community variability” that you use in the results

L191: receives individuals dispersing from all…

L217: A small paragraph describing the statistical analyses you have used (e.g. ANOVA or regression models) would be necessary here. Statistical analyses come a bit as a surprise in the result section otherwise…

L220-222: I wonder if ANOVA is appropriate here given the non-independence of observations within each simulation.

L247: were more resilient is unclear as you did not use this term consistently. Showed greater recovery?

L248-249: One interesting pattern in your figure is that swimming organisms also seem to be somehow impacted by the location of drying. Recovery of swimming organisms in drying-headwaters is greater in non-drying than in drying patches, whereas when drying occurs randomly or downstream recovery is similar among drying and non-drying patches. Could this indicate that when drying occurs upstream swimming organisms may be able to find refuge and maintain their community in remaining flowing sections?

L265: indicate what is this threshold value

L268-269 “perceived” is unclear. “had a lower impact on the response of swimming and flying organisms to connectivity”. This is difficult to see on Fig. 4; maybe you could add a regression line for each drying location on the figure.

L276: What do you mean by average values? This sentence is rather unclear.
L288: patch location or disturbance location?

L300 except for swimming organisms when drying occurs upstream…
L312: although rivers that naturally dry in their downstream sections show…
L319 First = most; L320: Last = least
L334-338: Maybe you could add a couple of sentences detailing how these other types of disturbances may also vary in their spatial extent and affect connectivity to link back to the main findings of your research.
Figure 4: How robust is this regression coefficient given the non-independence of your observations? Why not including interactions with drying location to assess if responses to connectivity vary depending on where a disturbance occurs?