Exploration of the Burning Question: A Long History of Fire in Eastern Australia with and without People

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for conducting this interesting and important study, shows fire regime changes and associated drivers during the past two lateglacial-interglacial transitions using a novel approach. The results presented show a strong potential for the separation of anthropogenic- from climate-driven fires in paleo records. The manuscript is well written and clear, and I only have a few comments to further increase clarity and reproducibility.

Ln 50: Some current Indigenous clean-up programmes (e.g., in NSW) include the removal of plastic wastes and land decontamination, which I do not think is what being referred to here. For clarity, you many consider replacing 'cleaning up Country' with 'Country keeping'.

Fig 1 caption: Consider replacing '...and the Australian continent' with '...in Australia'.

Consider including the reason >250-um sized charcoal particles were analysed and not 125 um-sized particles in the methods. To capture more localized fire? Large enough for FTIR scanning?

Fig 3 is not easily readable, especially the y-axis labels. Also what is ACA and BD?

Consider combining the results and discussion sections into one 'Results and discussion' section.

It will be helpful for future research to also highlight potential limitations of the study and future directions, especially the use of the FTIR. For instance, 1-4 charcoal pieces were scanned for each sample, will the result improve if 50 were scanned? The time factor is also worth mentioning, I guess scanning 50 or more charcoal pieces per sample will take longer. In addition is the temporal resolution, what is the feasibility/practicality of applying the FTIR to continuous samples (i.e. samples at 1cm intervals)? Will the CHAR result be different if 125um-sized charcoal particles were analysed, given that the occurrence of particles >250 um is usually much lower that >125 um in sediment samples? Which is the recommended best practice to get the best result, combine FTIR and charcoal count/measurement? or FTIR only is enough? 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for taking the time to read and review this article. Please find the attached document with our responses. 

Kind regards,

Mark Constantine

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper "Exploration of the burning question: A history of fire in eastern Australia over two late glacial-interglacial transitions; one with and one without people" finds a new analytical approach to discriminate the fire origin in an Australian paleoenvironment. The research question is well-presented, but the core of the research (advantages of using FTIR) is weakly planted. The methods are shallow for new users of FTIR and need to be more specific about spectra treatments. The results are very short and need to drive readers to understand how individual spectra are involved in a new index that reflects burn severity. The discussion is broader in other answers but not in the advantage of spectroscopic analyses. The paper needs to be reframed.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Thank you for taking the time to read and comment on our work.  Please see the attached file with our responses.

Kind regards,

Mark Constantine

Author Response File: Author Response.docx