Sustainability Assessment of Pasture-Based Dairy Sheep Systems: A Multidisciplinary and Multiscale Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Sorry but I could not fully understand that what was a “novel ingenuity” of the methodology the authors described. Therefore, I propose several points to be revised.

Please strengthen 1) the lack and need of methodology to evaluate the overall performance of pasture-based dairy sheep production systems in the Introduction section, 2) what will be brought by the proposed methodology as novel information which could not obtained by applying the conventional approach in the Opportunities and challenges section (L352-366), and 3) a possible breakthrough toward the difficulties in applying the proposed methodology in the Opportunities and challenges section (L367-375).

More Literatures should be cited in the Introduction section (e.g., L37-38, L40-43, L43-44, L52-54, L61-63)

Table S1 should be in the main text as Table 1.

Please strengthen the relationship between the content shown in Figure 1 each step in the Exploring a systematic methodology for assessing the sustainability of pasture-based dairy sheep systems section. Also, please increase the font size in Figure 1.

L256-258: Please discuss that how many farms could be enough, at least, for reliable statistical comparison proposed? Also, please change “Dunn’s” → “Bonferroni”.

The manuscript was sometimes hard to read, and its readability could be improved by the English checking. For instance,

L74: “would” → “could”?

L83: “There is consensus” → “There is a consensus”

L151: “homogenoeus” → “homogeneous”?

L243: “lineal” → “linear”

L352: “we present offers” → “we present will offer”?

L361: “In this way,” → (delete)

There are many multiple spaces, “  ” but not “ ”, in the manuscript.

Author Response

Please see the attachement.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper highlights the shortcomings of using any particular methodology like LCA, SLCA, or SES to evaluate economic, social and/or environmental dimensions, instead favoring a multi-disciplinary, multi-scalar approach.  

Incorporating more data and considering each project from various scales and disciplines will likely yield a more thorough analysis and highlight even more tradeoffs than a traditional LCA, SLCA, or SES analysis would do on its own.  But as the analysis gets more complicated, the repeatability between practitioners will likely be reduced.  

I think the concept presented herein is certainly interesting and worthy of inclusion into the academic world such that the approach can receive a broader scrutiny and broader application of the methodology.  Attempting to implement this approach over a broad range of industries will be needed to determine if this approach is practical.  

I believe the foundational work of Elinor Ostrom is worthy of inclusion into any paper discussing social ecological systems as this paper is doing, yet citations to her work is missing.   

This perspective paper is well written.  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has been improved.