Forest Fire Causes and Motivations in the Southern and South-Eastern Europe through Experts’ Perception and Applications to Current Policies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a review for the manuscript entitled Forest fire causes and motivations in the South and South-eastern Europe through the perception of experts: contribution to enhance the current policies submitted to the journal Forests. The manuscript seeks to understand the perceptions of experts with operational roles in forest fire management related to the causes of fires in their systems. The results show high variability across countries/regions in the main causes and perception of causes of fires. There is an outstanding number of Unknown causes in many of the countries/regions, which speaks to the need for a systematic methodology for determining fire cause across the fire-prone EU. The manuscript is well written and logically organized. The graphics are helpful in interpreting the results; however, the data source for the fire statistics (x-axis) was not always clear as the author’s show three independent data source from which statistics were drawn. In all, the manuscript provides support showing discrepancies between actual fire causes and expert perception and causes, arson-caused forest fires are generally overestimated, many fire causes remain unknown, and a concerted effort to develop a unified classification of fire causes as proposed by the European Commission.

Suggested edits

In the abstract, the term “importance” is a bit confusing. The importance of a fire could mean many things from the benefits it has on promoting certain forest structures, species and patterns, to the renewal of seed banks, to enhancing wildlife habitat, etc. I think what the authors mean is the importance of each fire cause to the total number of fires or area burned. But, this should be stated very clearly, because as it’s written, the motivation of the study is completely lost. Something like, “Experts were asked to score the relative contribution of fires by their ignition source compared to official reporting statistics for their region”.

I’m not sure what the first paragraph in section 3.1 is saying. I think this can be deleted. It’s clear, I think, that Unknown causes are an issue that needs to be remedied.

What is the X-axis for Figure 2? Number of ignitions?

I would keep the colors and shapes representing each country/region consistent across graphics to aid in interpretation.

Figure 4 shows the known causes of fires for each country/region. But, for instance Greece, had around 75% unknown ignitions, so it’s surprising to see in Figure 4 that 33% of ignitions are Negligence, 15% Deliberate, etc. So Figure 4 shows the relative contribution of each known cause across all known causes, not across known + unknown causes. This should be made explicit in the caption and the text. Otherwise these percentages would be much smaller if considering known + unknown causes – an important finding.

Figure 4 caption should read “Solid grey lines represent a logarithmic fitting of the data…”

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear review,

Please find attached the reply to your report.

Thank you so much for your constructive comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Forest fire causes and motivations in the South and South-eastern Europe through the perception of experts: contribution to enhance the current policies

Dear Authors

The basic science of this paper has been conducted to a good and appropriate standard. The author and his team wrote this paper according to journal scope. I reviewed this paper and I found there are some mistakes in this paper. Most of the mistakes in Abstract. Author should revise the abstract part. There are some minor language problems. I recommend minor revisions. All these are given below;

Comments

Abstract is not according to research. Author should revise with clear contents. Abstract is just like a report. I am disagreed about this part.

Check whole manuscript there are some typo mistakes.

Some sentences are very long, during revision author should split that sentences. I ll read whole manuscript after resubmission.

Line 41-48: This part should be belonging from introduction before objectives.

Line 56-57: author should write numbers in thousands or millions ha, no need to write.

Line 58: Which part of USA?

Line 64: again, numbering problem, should write in thousands ha.

Line 75: North African countries (write names of countries), because readers don’t know about the north-African countries

Line 84-87: merge this paragraph with previous paragraph.

Line 90: full stop after reference.

Before line 88: (Line 41-48: This part should be belonging from introduction before objectives).

Line 88: need to proof (local experts). All these experts already published work related this issue. If yes then cite his/her work here. Then reviewers and readers want to know about expertise of local experts.

Figure 1 should be revised. No coordinates, no legend? Author show countries with different color and show full name in legend then reader will understand easily.

In study area author should explain the extent with geographical area, total area and in further more author should explain the area of each country,

In study area; author also explain the topographical situation, population and climate.

Line 137: where is Table A1, I did not find supplementary material of this paper.

Line 228: unknown causes, change this heading. Heading in not suitable here

Lin 245: know causes also change this heading.

Author should improve the quality of figure 12 as well as other figures

Concluding remarks are very constructive. Its better if author revise this whole part. This part is very lengthy. Need to be revise.

In the end, I would like to say about your study. I believe you did a great job but we still need some improvement in your paper. There are still some English grammar and typo errors. I hope you will modify it very soon and resubmit it again in this journal. I will just focus on my comments.

Best Regards

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Please find attached the replies to your comments.

Thank you for your constructuve comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx