LAUSR

While reading the paper ‘The distribution and behavioral characteristics of plateau pikas (Ochotona curzoniae)’ (Qiu et al. 2021), I found that the authors of this paper appear to have made a mistake in reporting the surface temperature of their research area. The reasons are as follows: The study was carried out in August 2019 in Dari County of Qinghai Province, China (Qiu et al. 2021). I would like to point out that the historic high air temperature in Dari County was 23.2 °C (Wang et al. 2018), but in the paper by Qiu et al. (2021), the highest surface temperature was reported as 48 °C, and was more than twice the historic high temperature recorded for their research area. The reason for this discrepancy was that the surface temperature recorded in images was the temperature that was detected by the temperature receptors of the field infrared camera. There was no shelter provided for the field infrared camera in alpine meadow grasslands and the temperature of the camera increased rapidly under direct sunshine. However, the authors in this study incorrectly used the temperature recorded by the camera directly ZooKeys 1102: 201–202 (2022)