Wild Edible Fruits: A Systematic Review of an Under-Researched Multifunctional NTFP (Non-Timber Forest Product)

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is an interesting, well-written and well-researched review article on an important topic that fills a void in the existing literature. It is of potential interest to a wide range of audiences, including stakeholder groups, ecologists, policymakers, and advocacy groups. I have the following suggestions:

Methods

Describe how the categories of study were developed. Were these a priori or a posteriori categories developed from coding the "salient points" abstracted from the articles included in the review?

I find it hard to believe that the 185 articles fit neatly into just one of these categories, as the results section suggests. More detail is needed on how these categories were applied and if there was overlap.

Results

Sections 4-6 should be relabeled/renumbered to indicate that they, too, are part of the results section.

The introduction to this section is the weakest part of the paper. The initial paragraph is poorly structured, incomplete, and confusing (89-94).  The authors should provide a more systematic overview of the papers reviewed. In the methods section, for example, they note that  "the topics of agriculture, biology, economics, environmental science and studies, food science, forestry, plant science, social science, and urban studies" were included in the review. I'd like to see a breakdown of articles by journal or researcher discipline, to get a better sense of who is conducting research on WEFs.

The flow between the first and second (101-110) paragraphs is poor, and the information presented in the second paragraph seems incomplete and/or misplaced. If 27 articles (more than "several," I'd say) focused on a single species over a wide region, what was the focus of the other 158 articles? How many focused on a single species over a restricted area, etc? Similarly, in the previous paragraph (89), if 47 articles "focused on multi-use species that also bear edible fruits," did the other 138 focus on single-use WEF species?

According to the authors, 48 percent of the articles included in the review were descriptive, yet they provide no review of those articles in the manuscript, as they do the other three categories of study. This is a glaring omission, since ethnobotanical research lays the foundation for other forms of research on WEFs

Discussion

7.1 Avenues for research

The authors thoroughly lay out what WEF-related research needs to be conducted and why. I recommend they add a paragraph at the end of this section outlining their suggestions--beyond  stakeholder engagement-- for how that research might be conducted and by whom. The social-ecological research they describe, for example, would seem to lend itself to--if not require--multidisciplinary teams of researchers.

Conclusion

As currently written, lines 421-426 don't belong in the conclusion.

Author Response

I thank the reviewer for their helpful comments on our manuscript.   The changes made in accordance with their suggestions are listed here:

The Methods section now has a longer third paragraph that reads:

Abstracts, findings, and recommendations from these studies were   manually summarised in the form of salient points in MS Excel. Four emergent   themes were identified, based on which articles were classified into   categories, namely, conservation, descriptions, ecology, and economics (Table   1). In cases where articles covered more than one of these themes, categories   were assigned based on the theme that was most comprehensively addressed in   the research questions or findings of the respective article.

Sections have been renumbered.

The opening Results paragraph has been restructured to correspond to the third Methods paragraph.

A pie chart that shows the proportions of articles from different disciplines has been inserted (Figure 1).

The sentence on multi-use species (Line 105) has been edited for clarity, and now reads:

About a quarter of the 185 articles (n=47) focused on multi-use species that also bear edible fruits, while the remainder had wild edible fruits as their primary focus.

The second results paragraph (Line 123) is now a separate section that touches on the ethnobotanic and taxonomic descriptions.

The sentence about 27 studies documenting single species use over wide regions has been put into context (Line 127).

A line has now been inserted (Line 409) in the first paragraph of Section 4.1, and it reads:

WEFs are of relevance to a number of domains in addition to agroecology and ethnobotany (Figure 1), and the human dimensions of WEF use need to be further integrated with ecological knowledge to ensure their   perpetuity.

The contents of these lines (Lines 459-465) are one sentence summaries of key findings from sections 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors

I find this article very good, although i have some doubts about the methods used, I can not understand how the analysis was done, what program was used? The methods section should be more detailed. The only thing I think they should improve is the method session, because although describing the process, I think it should be more detailed, for example with the choice of variables / categories, with what criterion, how these variables worked in MS excel when there are now more refined software like MAxQDA Atas ti and  text data mining for big data.

Its just asuggestion does not mean that it is wrong if it is  published like this, only that it would be more rigorous

Best wishes

Author Response

I thank the reviewer for their helpful comments on our manuscript. The changes made in accordance with their suggestion are:

The Methods section now has a longer third paragraph that reads:

Abstracts, findings, and recommendations from these studies were manually summarised in the form of salient points in MS Excel. Four emergent themes were identified, based on which articles were classified into categories, namely, conservation, descriptions, ecology, and economics (Table 1). In cases where articles covered more than one of these themes, categories were assigned based on the theme that was most comprehensively addressed in the research questions or findings of the respective article.

We acknowledge that the use of review software and or text mining may have added rigour to our methodology, but were at the time more comfortable with the traditional manual method, especially considering that the final dataset (185 articles) wasn’t particularly large.

Sincerely