Minor concerns:
1. When discussing disturbance frequencies and 'levels' throughout the manuscript, consistency of language is key. These different treatment 'levels' are misleading if described as disturbance levels since this description can be interpreted as disturbance intensity if not read carefully. Clarity of language surrounding disturbance manipulation is really important for specific understanding and placing the study in the wider context of studies of disturbance. We suggest changing 'levels' to frequency/ies' throughout.
2. We suggest including T0 data in the NMDS plot in Figure 1B. However, we were not able to understand why two different ordination methods were used in Figure 1 and suggest using only one method (NMDS or PCoA). The plot could be combined into one, if color represents disturbance frequency and shape represents time.
3. The frequency of measurements implies sampling with replacement (but this was not mentioned in the methods section), we would like to see a description of how replacement was achieved and discussion of what the impacts of replacement may have been. We are also interested in the implications of scaling up the microcosm size and varying initial conditions to reproduce and expand the experimental design for further work testing the new model.
4. Since the Results section appears before the Materials and Methods section in this manuscript, we suggest writing out the full names of abbreviated terms in the Results section so that readers can read sections in the order they appear and know what abbreviations represent.
5. The symbols and colors chosen for the figures made it difficult to interpret the figures in many cases. For example, in figure 3, L4 and L6 are both represented by light grey squares that are very difficult to discern in the legend and are not visible in the plot (the plot may have been changed without updating the legend?). To make it easier to interpret figures, we suggest choosing one color scheme for all figures and keeping the colors for each disturbance level consistent throughout all figures. Additionally, if points are overlapping, we suggest increasing the alpha (transparency) of the points. Finally, it would be significantly easier and quicker to interpret the figures if legends were incorporated into the figures.
6. Although, at several points in the paper, the authors reference the softwares used, and sometimes, the corresponding parameters, we would encourage the authors to share both the raw data (the performance indicators in addition to the raw sequences, which are available on NCBI) and the accompanying code used to analyze it (github or similar site). In some cases the citations are missing for the relevant packages or software. Sharing the code would shed light on the details of some procedures that are not made explicit in the manuscript, and increase the reproducibility of the experiment.
This comment is unique to the preprint. The layout of the preprint, which we understand is likely the result of the requirements of a submission format, makes understanding the figures rather challenging. For future preprint submissions, we encourage the authors to consider associating the figures with their titles and captions, and to put the figures inline, close to the relevant parts of the text.
Overall, it was a great pleasure reading this interesting and exciting work and we are extremely grateful that the authors posted it as a preprint on bioRxiv. We sincerely hope that our comments are useful to the authors and we look forward to reading the final version when it is published.
Very best wishes,
The OIST Ecology and Evolution Preprint Journal Club