Objective and authoritative peer reviews are essential for ensuring the quality and value of Biotropica to its readers and to science in general. Your evaluation has a major influence in making our decision as to whether we accept a manuscript for publication. We ask reviewers to provide prompt, fair, constructive and perceptive reviews of submitted manuscripts, and to be respectful of authors' work, even if judged not to be of sufficient quality. Please also consider that English may not be the author's first language, and that evaluations may comment on the quality of the language, but should not use this as a criterion for evaluation.

Biotropica favors tighter, shorter articles than has been the case in the past, allowing us to publish, and accept, more submissions than previously. We welcome suggestions for reducing the length of papers, and for placing figures and tables that are not of central importance onto Online Supplementary Materials.

On behalf of Biotropica and the ATBC membership, we are very grateful for the considerable time and effort you invest in the review process.

Confidentiality

Submitted manuscripts should be treated confidentially, except when it is necessary to seek advice on specific technical points. If you feel a colleague is more qualified than you to review the paper, do not pass the manuscript on to that person without first requesting permission from the Editor to do so. Your review and recommendation will also be considered confidential unless you specify otherwise.

Conflicts of Interest

If there is a reason why you might have difficulty writing an objective review, please decline the invitation to review with a brief explanation. In such a situation we would be grateful for suggestions of alternative reviewers. This would include any situation where your have a current association with one of the authors, or have collaborated with the author in the past three years. If in doubt, please contact either the Subject Editor or the Editor.

The Review

A review should provide the editors with expert opinion regarding the quality of the study and the manuscript, and should provide authors with clear and constructive feedback on how the manuscript might be improved. If the research is flawed, please provide a constructive assessment.

The important and novel contributions of the paper should be identified, as should its major strengths and weaknesses.

A review should consider the following questions:

• Is the study novel? If not, please provide details. And to what extent does the study have general interest to the broad readership of Biotropica?
  
• Is a clear hypothesis-testing framework adopted or, if the study is descriptive, does it make an important scientific contribution?
  
• Are the conclusions supported by the data presented, and considered in the context of other published literature?
  
• Are any important references missing, and if so, which?
  
• Is scientific quality to a sufficiently high standard? Are the methods appropriate and sufficiently detailed such that the work could be repeated by someone else? Are the statistical design and analyses appropriate and correct? Are significance statements justified?
  
• Is the manuscript presented clearly and concisely, both structurally, with a clear set of objectives and conclusions, and clarity of the written text?
  
• Is the manuscript of appropriate length relative to information content? (Papers published in Biotropica have a strict 5000-word limit excluding abstract and references. Commentaries and Insights articles are limited to 2500 words, and 8000 words are permissible for Reviews).
  
• Are all tables and figures necessary, and are they clearly labeled and self-explanatory? Should any figures, tables or other information be moved to Online Supplementary Materials?
  

Please include both general and specific comments bearing on these questions, and emphasize your most significant points. The suitability of the manuscript for publication in Biotropica should be declared to the Editor and not to the author.

Annotating the manuscript

You may write directly on the manuscript using ‘track-changes' or equivalent, but please provide a summary of you remarks in the "Comments for the Author(s)" window. If you add comments to the word version of the manuscript, this will be converted to a PDF which will eliminate any clues that may reveal your identity. Please do not annotate the PDF version of the manuscript.