Review: Predicting adaptation and evolution of plasticity from temporal environmental change

Summary:
There are many ways to model adaptation and plasticity in response to temporal environmental changes of individual components (changes in shifts, trends, cyclic changes, or noise) but few address combinations of these. This study fills that gap. This theory was then applied to a real time series from a global marine hotspot in southern Australia allowing for hypothesis testing. In addition, this model is now available in a Shiny app allowing others to easily implement these models into their own work.

The authors are clear and concise in both their explanations and their figures. It should be noted that the supplemental material is essential to fully understand the model presented. Ideally if a larger work count would be accepted it would allow more crucial details to be in the main text rather than in the sup. To the credit of the authors the summary of the supplemental material in the main text is adequate given the word limit. The authors sufficiently responded to the previous comments of previous reviewers and even collaborated with previous reviewer 1 and added them as an author.

Methods: If a word limit can be adjusted by MEE then the addition of more details in the main text would be greatly appreciated having to go back and forth between the mint text and supplementary material was taxing on the reader.

Lines 203-204 (and throughout): It would be helpful to include the definition of “noise colour” and if that is different than amount of noise in general. What is the relationship between amount of noise and noise colour? It would be good to have this clearly defined in the main text.

Figure 4: it is not intuitive to have the “Coulour of noise” be depicted as like type in 4B and 4C. This may be as simple as a wording change or possible change in figure but is related to the comment above.

Line 323 Typo: period needed after (Hoffmann & Sgrò, 2011) citation not a comma

Below are completely optional suggestions and is left at the discretion of the editors/authors given the limited space in the main text.

Lines 214-216: This reviewer was left wanting the full factorial analysis of the combination of components. This would allow you to then begin to more confidently determine what may be driving/dominating tolerance curves. I look forward to future analysis examining this as mentioned in the main text.

Lines 261-262: The case study used a hypothetical marine invertebrate that was based on a marine tube worm from the middle location of the global marine hot spot. It would be interesting to compare the case study findings with the real worm data (if it exist) and compare how well the model did.