Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

For me, the article is very interesting. Various methods of structure and function of Norway spruce forest ecosystems due to air pollution and climate changes analysis were used.

As a geobotanist, I didn’t have enough information in the article about diagnostic (dia) species. It would be important to add examples of rare species in these spruce forests of 4 ecoregions in Central Balkans and finale note what prospects they have for conservation in spruce forests with changing air pollution and climate change.

Sections 3 and 4 of Article contain important conclusions, but Section 5. Conclusions itself does not make them very clear.

Figure 4 is difficult to read – it is too small and fuzzy.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you very much for taking time to review our manuscript. We appreciate every comment since it helped us learn and realize where are all the mistakes we've made.

As you kindly suggested we submitted the manuscript to the English editing service, and the current version is completely proofed.

Below you can find all the changes we've made, sorted chronologically:

L1- Word forests in title changed to forest as suggested by English editor,

L5- Typo corrected (³ to ²),

L23- We deleted the HSI abbreviation since it’s not very informative at this point,

L42-45- Detailed distribution of P. abies added,

L66- Missing reference added,

L79-80 Full name of the Conventions added,

L89-95 Reordered bullets,

L96-99 Adaptive management added,

L99-101 Management strategies added, with the special attention to the conservation measures to be included in named strategies and management plans.,

L134-136 Definition of diagnostic species was added,

L 152-155 Information about Sorensen similarity index moved from results to Material and method,

L 206-207 We added some examples of endemic and Tertiary relic species,

L335-341 Information about precipitation interception and its influence on soil moisture added,

L435-438 Information about research/modelling constraints and recommendation for further actions added,

We hope you will find this version of our manuscript improved to the previous, and recommend it for publishing.

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is generally well written and provides useful insights for silviculturist and forestry societies, about the modelling response of Norway spruce forests vegetation to  climate and environmental changes. However, the paper could be made clearer and more straightforward.

General Comments:
My main suggestion to improve the paper is to rework the introduction and the discussion to 1) identify a clear research question or hypothesis, the introduction is lacking a “problem to solve”. It was not clear to me why such a detailed study would improve management; 2)  Some work would be necessary to improve the clarity of the text: shorter sentence, less and better use of conjunctions, correct some poor phrasing. 3) At the end of Introduction, I can't find why you did this research? I mean research necessity in unclear. 

Specific Comments:

L 23: HIS?? or HSI? use full term instead of abbreviation for the first time. 

L 25: Research implication for forest managers need to be added. 

L 41: Add a statistic of Picea abies distribution in European countries., if it's possible. 

L 58: Change Picea abies to "P. abies" here and rest of manuscript.

Figure 1: Add countries name to this figure. 

L 201-203: This is belonged to Materials and Methods. 

Figures 2-4: Improve the quality of presentation of this figure. 

Line 323: Maybe it would be nice to talk about rainfall interception of Picea abies in temperate forest and its effect on soil moisture (evidence can be found in temperate studies in Iran, Germany, etc). 

At the end of conclusion: Research constraints and guidelines for future research should be added. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you very much for taking time to read and comment our manuscript. We've found each and every comment you left, very informative, and very precise. Your review helped us improve significantly our manuscript, and also learned a lot from our mistakes.

Complete manuscript was proofed for English language and style

Please find below all the changes we've made to the manuscript per your comments (and some mistakes we caught along the way):

L1- Word forests in title changed to forest, suggested by English editor,

L5- Typo corrected (³ to ²),

L23- We deleted the HSI abbreviation since it’s not very informative at this point

L42-45- Detailed distribution of P. abies added, since we couldn’t find the statistics of named species by countries in Europe

L66- Missing reference added

L79-80 Full name of the Conventions added

L89-95 Reodered bullets

L96-101 Comments about adaptive management and management strategies added,

Figure 1. Countries names added,

L134-136 Definition of diagnostic species was added,

L 152-155 Information about Sorensen similarity index moved from results to Material and method

L 206-207 Endemic and relic species added,

Figure 2, 3 and 4 were replaced

*if Figure 4 is still unreadable we will change the species names to abbreviations and make the font larger,

L335-341 Information about precipitation interception and its influence on soil moisture added,

L435-438 Information about research/modelling constraints and recommendation for further actions added.

We hope you will find this version of the manuscript significantly improved and recommend it for publishing.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to thank the authors for addressing my comments. The manuscript is significantly improved, and so I recommend acceptance.

Author Response

We would like to express our gratitude to the reviewer for recognizing our effort for the improvement of the manuscript.

We also changed the Figure_4, and introduced abbreviations.

That is the reason that we changed:

L 294-296- added abbreviations in parentheses.

On behalf of all authors, I would like to thank the reviewer, one more time, for taking time to review our manuscript and to recommend it for publishing.