Relative Importance of Landscape and Climate Factors to the Species Diversity of Plant Growth Forms along an East Asian Archipelago

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript by Lee et al. is concerned with studying the effects of different environmental factors on the plant species richness across 578 islands of the Korean archipelago. The novelty of the submitted study is that it not only analyses species richness of whole plant communities but takes into account the five main growth forms (trees, shrubs, ferns, forbs, graminoids). I regard this study as sound and worth to be published in Forests. The manuscript is well written (English is on a high level) and chosen methods are appropriate. However, there are some ambiguities and few points that could be improved.

 

- The authors mention that they analysed the vegetation of 619 islands of which 41 are without vegetation, thus were excluded from the study (i.e., vegetation on 578 islands was studied). I wonder what criteria were used to select the 619 islands. Especially because some of them are without vegetation. It would be good, if the authors could explain this in the Materials and Methods section.

 

- The authors divided the dataset into uninhabited and inhabited islands. Are these categories meant to describe different levels of human disturbance or human activities? If yes, did the authors verified whether permanent human occupation is an appropriate criterion to distinguish islands with and without significant human impact? I mean it is conceivable that vegetation on some uninhabited islands is much more disturbed by human activities than on some inhabited islands.

 

- Please provide more details about the used climate data. In lines 165-166 it says that “national digital climate maps produced by the National Center of Agro-Meteorology” were used but the provided reference seems to be a secondary source. How the climate parameters were calculated per island? Did you average the data on a spatial scale? Does the original source represent gridded data, which you downsized and then assigned to each island or did you calculate the parameters for each island individually?

 

- The study would generally benefit from some additional descriptive statistics for the selected environmental parameters (area, distance, connectivity, MAT, MAP). Perhaps box-whisker-plots would be a suitable option. They should be provided for the two subsets; uninhabited and inhabited islands. This would allow the reader to better understand the differences between both subsets and perhaps provide further implications for the discussion of the results. In the discussion you mention that the studied inhabited islands are on average larger than the uninhabited ones. Actually, you start to mention some values in the Discussion (lines 344-346), but it would be more appropriate the present this systematically for all parameters and both subsets in the Materials and Methods section or in the Results section.

 

- Please add the missing axes labels in Fig. 5

 

- In Fig. 4, please use either singular or plural throughout the labels (e.g., fern or ferns, forb or forbs).

 

- lines 339-340: I do not understand why an article about “Environmental and geometric drivers of small mammal diversity along elevational gradients in Utah” is provided as reference here. The sentence is about climate as one of the main drivers for plant species distribution and richness. Please check once more, if useful references (and primary references) are provided in each case.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

General Comments:

Assessing the influence of landscape and climate factors to the species diversity of plant growth is an interesting topic of research. Although, the paper is generally well written and represents some interesting results I think there is still a bit of work to do to improve the quality of the manuscript.

 

Special comments

1. Reading the whole manuscript, I feel that the author has not answered this question clearly. Whether species richness patterns between inhabited and uninhabited islands are similar? For example, the results section lacks a description of the basic distribution of species on inhabited and uninhabited islands (similar to figure2).
2. In addition, there is also a lack of discussion on the impact of inhabited and uninhabited islands on species richness.
3. The description of (2) is not clear. lines 90-93
4. Materials and Methods section. This study was achieved using plant data from 578 islands of an archipelago in South Korea. The author should highlight the basic information about the 578 islands.
5. Lines 236-273, Whether this part belongs to 3.3 species richness patterns between inhabited and uninhabited islands. In other words, 3.2 should be divided into two parts.
6. Add image ordinates title and check all images, especially Figure 5.
7. Line 226. The slope of lines indicates the strength of correlation. How is the slope calculated?

Author Response

"Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx