Potential Areas in Poland for Forestry Plantation

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript „Potential areas in Poland for forestry plantation?” reports the results about the potential of Polish land, which could be used for the cultivation of fast-growing trees plantations. The aims of the article are rather interesting and have the potential to be the topics of a research article. The main problem of the article is that it analyses very narrow and specific topic, applicable only to Poland. In the other countries, due to different forms of land and forest ownership and regulation it’s difficult to apply the results obtained. For his reason in the discussion part does not contain comparison with other counties data.

I would suggest to the author to improve the manuscript quality:

• The results of this study are country specific and may do not apply to other country and regions.
• Originality: this is the first question to be asked: the authors need to clearly highlight where and how their work is original in comparison to earlier papers; such an originality is a prerequisite to publication.
• There is no discussion section in the article. It is necessary to compare your results with other authors results or to compare different methods.
• Conclusions must be improved, because at the moment it’s more like abstract. Conclusion must show what results are the best and what new was found in this study.

However, the current draft in my opinion needs to be further developed before it is ready for publishing

Author Response

We are grateful for your comments. We improved article according to your suggestions with beliefs that now our paper can be published in Forests. Especially, we rebuiled Discussion part and Results. All changes are marked with green colour.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I miss a scientific discussion and integration of the results.

Please discuss, among other things, possible problems and limitations of the assumptions made for the calculations, e.g., competing demands on the land by nature conservation, tourism (landscape image), or problems that may arise from the fact that the minimum economic land size for the production of certain landscape crops may no longer exist due to the surrender of agricultural land to timber production, and so on.

Compare and discuss the results obtained in your study with the results of other studies on the land potential for the cultivation of fast-growing woody plants, especially poplar and larch, in Poland and in other, especially Central and Northern European countries.

The Conclusions are more of a summary of the findings. They should show more conclusions for the practice in Poland and for the scientific knowledge gain, which are given by the results and the scientific discussion of the results.

Author Response

We are grateful for your comments. We improved article according to your suggestions with beliefs that now our paper can be published in Forests. Especially, we rebuiled Discussion part and Results. All changes are marked with green colour.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors took into account my comments and they proceeded with the necessary revisions.

Author Response

Thank you for positive recommendation. 

Sincerely,

Authors

Reviewer 2 Report

In the manuscript, cuts and clarifications have been made in the methodology and especially in the results, which serve the manuscript well.

But unfortunately, almost no changes have been made in the international scientific context, neither in the overall orientation of the manuscript nor in the conclusions. Furthermore, a discussion is still missing, which 1. discusses the results in a scientifically sophisticated way, and which 2. places an integration into the supranational context and the fundamental scientific knowledge context.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are grateful for your comments. We improved article according to your suggestions with beliefs that now our paper can be published in Forests. All new changes are marked in yellow colour (previously changes were marked in green colour).

"Moderate English changes required" – after round 1 of revision and "Extensive editing of English language and style required" – after round 2 of revison

The article was checked 3 times by a native speaker. We belive that the article is prepard well in the language context.

„…almost no changes have been made in the international scientific context, neither in the overall orientation of the manuscript nor in the conclusions. Furthermore, a discussion is still missing, which 1. discusses the results in a scientifically sophisticated way, and which 2. places an integration into the supranational context and the fundamental scientific knowledge context.”

We made a lot of changes following to your comments as we understand the needs of giving the international context and we made some changes after round 1. Because you still suggested us to give more scientific data, we included many information dealing with classification (limitation) of collected data for Poland, different directions of using wood from plantations as well as the particular information about planted wood species. You can find new content in lines 47-80.

As you can see in the new version of paper, there is much more data regarding to international context, especially European. However, in part 3 – Results and discussion, we gave information dealing with wider region than Europe.

Moreover, we implemented some intersting note regarding to influence plantation on the enhancement biodiversity (line 364-375) as well as to local policies etc determining possibilities of plantation development (line 410-428).

The Conclusions part was also supplemented.

Sincerely,

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx