Modeling of Dead Wood Potential Based on Tree Stand Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

“Modeling of dead wood potential based on tree stand data” – the manuscript raises important issues related to biodiversity in forests, and I find interesting and valuable from the perspective of nature conservation. Although the proposed modelling method is not perfect and still needs refining, the results show the potential of this type of calculations.

However, I would recommend to make some minor corrections before publishing.

• Lines 64-65 – “Dead wood has been used as a surrogate marker for biodiversity as there are well-known dependencies between” – perhaps adding a word “marker” will make the sentence more clear.
• Perhaps some of the most recent papers, such as Korhonen, A., Siitonen, J., Kotze, D. J., Immonen, A., & Hamberg, L. (2020). Stand characteristics and dead wood in urban forests: Potential biodiversity hotspots in managed boreal landscapes. Landscape and Urban Planning, 201, 103855, could be worth taking into account in Introduction or Discussion.
• Are the obtained values of coefficient of determination high enough to considered the proposed method as suitable for this type of predictions? Since the method described is not fully appropriate but just shows the great potential of such calculations/modelling, I would recommend to emphasise this fact in Conclusions instead of a statement that it is “a viable option for acquiring wall-to-wall dead wood data for landscape-level analysis”.

I would also recommend some minor linguistic corrections to sort out the manuscript (i.e. “as forestry causes biodiversity loss as it fundamentally changes” in lines 21-22; “part of the life cycle of and one of the most important factors” in line 48; „the importance of including dead wood in forest simulations” in line 70, etc.).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

 

I appreciate the novelty and innovative approach of authors to model the dead wood potential. I have only a few comments/recommendation to the authors:

• If the abstract should be ”an invitation to read a paper” I would recommend to present there more the crucial results and conclusions
• lines 206–207, why DBH in mm, in other parts of article is in cm, please unify
• Table 2b, lines 209-210, is it DBH = mean diameter? only last line are mean values, the rest are min and max, I would recommend to change the table title, it is a bit unclear, the same in Table 2c, line 212
• lines 248-253, this range concerns DWP values, what are the differences between dead wood and DWPs volumes (modelled values)? were statistically evaluated?
• Table 3, correlation strength between DWP and reference data is weak/moderate/ strong, but mostly weak (Kuhmo), in this case if we making predictions, the SE can be more useful metric to know how precise these predictions are, than R-squared
• Appendix A, I am not sure if it is necessary to publish the whole appendix – 168 functions with coefficients (more than 8 pages), rather no, than yes, I think. The functions have sample character, what about their generalisation? Also, are differences significant? I would recommend summarize this section in more simple, but appropriate way.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf