Thank you for the opportunity to review the article entitled “Game target-group: A unified framework to estimate animal abundance from harvest data”. The authors essentially describe how to use inhomogeneous Poisson point process models to model harvest data under limited data availability for hunting management information. Overall I felt the article was well-written and does not really warrant much in the way of too major of revisions. A few things that came to mind while reading:

Title: I understand that the game target-group is what’s being used to inform the iPPP modelling approach, but I wonder if it makes more sense to explicitly use the term “inhomogeneous Poisson point process” in the title? I didn’t really understand what the paper was going to be about given the title (from a non harvest background), but I might be able to wager a better guess had the iPPP information been in the title. Plus, “point processes” seem to be all the rage right now among statistical ecologists, and so this useful paper might gain more traction if the type of point process is explicitly spelled out in the title right away.

Table 1: Would you be able to include some of the extra MCMC statistics in this table as well, such as Rhat and effective sample size? It’s nice to see these in the context of Bayesian modelling with MCMC to get an idea of how efficient these models are being sampled.

Simulation study: I don’t necessary expect the authors to do this, but what might the results of this simulation study be if you used more informative priors? I.e., could informative priors be used to decrease that sample size requirement? I only mention this because in the discussion you go on to talk about incorporating other structures to the model (spatially explicit stuff, etc) which generally can make models more data-hungry. But with informative priors, maybe not so much. Could be nice to see a mention about this in the discussion.

A few other points:

Line 4: should be “have potential to be used...”

Line 32: is that supposed to be XX century? I suppose it’s 20th century, seems odd to use XX?

Line 106: should be “harvest data...were collected”

Line 195: no comma needed here