Review Reports - The Impact of Local Climate Change on Radial <i>Picea abies</i> Growth: A Case Study in Natural Mountain Spruce Stand and Low-Lying Spruce Monoculture

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is the review of the manuscript (Manuscript ID: forests-1313607)

Type of manuscript: Article,

Authors: Vladimír Šagát , Ivan Ružek, Karel Šilhán, Pavel Beracko

Title: The impact of local climate change consequences on radial Picea abies

growth: A case study in natural mountain spruce stand and low-lying spruce monoculture

Journal: Forests, Submitted to section: Forest Meteorology

Authors analyzed tree-ring width of spruce growing in natural mountain spruce forests and in monocultures planted in lower areas and comparison with climate (temperatures, precipitations) in period 1961-2019.

I have few comments and suggestions to you.

Below I list specific comments:

Valuable article, but has one basic error: how can you analyze the year (2019 TRW) when samples from trees were taken during the growing season (in June and July - line 108 and 109 !!, also line 154 and all analyzes) - the growth was not fully developed and you need to repeat all the calculations without this year !!

and it is worth working on references - few items and no publications from the Polish part of the Carpathians (eg. Kaczka or other authors also worked with spruce).

line 89 explain the abbreviation RWI

Fig. 1 and Fig. 2 must be swapped to correspond to the following photo in Fig. 3

Fig. 3 it is worth including the location of meteorological stations

line 186 and 190 - remove the space between eg. 9.8 and ⁰C

line 201-214 and Fig 7 and 8 - you use abbreviations in the text, eg. TM5 and there is no such thing in the drawings, it should be M5 ??, in M means month ?? explain it, for example TPM11 is P11 ??

it cannot be read in this form !!

Fig. 7 and 8 description of the vertical axis Spearnan, error

line 220-244 - use the same markings as in Tables 4 and 5, otherwise it is very difficult to read !!

line 220 - in my opinion not TGS but TXGS, check and improve

line 238 - probably I26-39 and not I40 ??

line 240 TM7 negative relationships ??

line 281-299 - also correct to make the text agree with the markings in the tables

line 285 and not PP12 and PM3 ??

line 287 – in my opinion I18 and not I 17

line 288 be instead of I28-37: I28-31 and I35-37 ??

line 431 - 2019 ?? it is impossible to analyze the year in which the vegetation did not end and the annual growth (TRW) was not fully developed

statements: what about access to data, chronologies should be available in an open repository

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you for your valuable advice regarding our article. I have considered all your suggestions and the text have been updated. Please see the attachment with tracked changes.

Yours sincerely

Vladimír Šagát et al.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Well written paper dealing with climate-growth response differences between two stands: one in Biely Kriz and other in Osobita, differing by the altitude. Temporal variation of the dendroclimatological relationships were found for the period 1961-2019.

Here are just minor comments. After adressing them, the paper could be published in Forests.

line 63 and 421: Ponocná et al. deals with acid pollution loads, however what about other air pollution such as tropospheric ozone. I suggest to add some lines about tropospheric ozone pollution, which is known to influence re-allocation of carbon pools in trees. Additionally, you might include 10.3390/atmos12010082 dealing with O3 effects and (Zapletal, M., Juráň, S., Krpeš, V., Michna, K., Edwards-Jonášová, M. and Cudlín, P. 2018. Effect of ozone flux on selected structural and antioxidant characteristics of a mountain Norway spruce forest. Baltic Forestry 24(2): 261-267.) showing change in carotenoids content.

line 85: climate change has a magnitude of consequences, I do not think you address here all of them, please be more specific which ones are the part of your hypothesis

Figure 4: It would be better to put a line to y-axis too, put those graphs close to each other and share one y-axis, when it has the same units and make the bold line in one colour only and then make it such as A (Biely kríž) and B (Osobitá)

Figure 5 and 6: show also y-axis line.

Figure 6: Precipitation for Osobita being showed as added to Biely Kriz location in impossible for reader to see. It would be better to do not use bar graph, but a simple line separated for B. kríž and Osobitá being not added to each other.

line 359-360: if soil moisture will be measured on 30-min bases, several indices and drought characteristics could be possible to derive from that. Just a note.

line 363: please use "was not"

line 414-418: if the analysis is not part of the paper (and not shown), please remove it.