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After careful evaluation, the revised manuscript has addressed all the comments from two anonymous reviewers. It has been significantly improved and can be accepted, though no response has been received from one previous reviewer.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Monika Mortimer, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Thank you for your submission to PeerJ. Based on the comments from two reviewers, your manuscript requires major comments before it can be accepted.
**PeerJ Staff Note:** Please ensure that all review, editorial, and staff comments are addressed in a response letter and that any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate.
This paper highlights the important contributions of local community activities to the microplastics and tire wear particles in road dust in the Arctic. Although many studies have reported their sources by long-range transport to the Arctic, works on the local sources are very limited. The manuscript was organized well and written clearly, with background of this study being sufficiently introduced. Figures and Tables were also prepared in good manner.
My suggestion is that please shorten the abbreviation for IQ-COM-X by removing the initial "IQ-" for easier intuition throughout the text, Tables and Figures.
The method part is designed professionally, with site selection, QA/QC, sample collection, extraction, identification, and data analysis being described in detail.
One suggestion is to move section 3.1 (lines 246-256) to section 2 and combine with the QA/QC part for more straightforward understanding.
Another question is what is the purpose of calculating mass concentrations and how to define the volume of MPs or tire wear particles with irregular, diverse shapes?
The findings of this article are generally novel and significant, providing the field evidence on the unnegligible impacts of local communities on MPs pollution in the Arctic. The data explanation and discussion are sound and insightful. The limitations of this study are also discussed by the authors.
Raman spectrometer is recommended to identify MPs and tire wear particles with smaller size than 50 um in further studies.
I can not find the supporting information containing Figures S1-S4, please verify.
Review of Manuscript 118053v1
General points
Manuscript 118053v1 provides very interesting new data on a source of microplastic pollution that – to my knowledge- has not yet been covered elsewhere: Parking lots. This is even more important as the new data refer to microplastics in atmospheric fallout from an area with scant data: the Arctic. The MS is well-written and professional English is used throughout. Nevertheless, I suggest a few changes (see marked pdf). However, in my opinion several points need to be addressed before I can recommend its publication. As it is quite a few points, it adds up to a major revision, I am afraid, but should be doable.
My main criticism would be that because of the sampling approach chosen, we cannot be sure that the samples are comparable, if I understood correctly. We don’t have any idea when and for how long dust could have accumulated in each area. This could have been circumvented by deploying the same type of pre-cleaned container at each location for the same period. This would have resulted in equal sample sizes and known deposition times, i.e. reduced uncertainty and increased comparability of resulting data. The authors briefly mention this in their critique at the end, but I think it merits further mention, e.g. also when discussing the results, especially in terms of significant differences between treatments.
While the Literature is well-covered in most areas, I recommended a few additional newer references, which might add background or should be cited in the context IMO.
The MS should have hypotheses, a necessity in any scientific study in my opinion. And you do have hypotheses judging from your sampling set up, but unfortunately you do not state them clearly. I suggest you add null-hypotheses at the end of the introduction and use them to structure your MS in each part, i.e. Materials, Results, Discussion.
More detail is needed to transparently disclose how the data were obtained. Your study should be reproducible. Currently, crucial information is lacking for this
no comment
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