Evaluating Effects of Post-Fire Climate and Burn Severity on the Early-Term Regeneration of Forest and Shrub Communities in the San Gabriel Mountains of California from Sentinel-2(MSI) Images

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript entitled “Evaluating effects of post-fire climate and burn severity on the early-term recovery of arbor and shrub communities in the San Gabriel Mountains of California from Sentinel-2(MSI) images” deals with an interesting topic which is the analysis of post-fire vegetation restoration and the influence of different structural and coyuntural variables. Although the objectives are clear and well stated and the image processing methods are correct, the analysis has important problems that prevent its publication in its current form.

Some of them are detailed below to be considered by the authors.

Regarding the climatic variables. It is not clear the spatial representation of the climatic variables, if they are provided for just one observatory or many in the study area. It Will be important to know not just the mean values provided in the Table 2, but specially the spatial distribution of these variables within the fire perimeter.

Regarding the classification method. The authors indicate that the NBR has the best separation effect but they do not provide any data about the performance of the remaining índices applied. The visual inspection of Fig 4 is not enough evidence to support this conclusión.

Regarding the assessment of burn severity. The manuscript does not provide any statistic about the accuracy of this classification (it only appears in the discussion section with a percentage). The authors did not explain the reason for this methodology and not using, for example, the dNBR intervals created for this type of ecosystems.

Last, but not least, since I think this is the main drawback of the manuscript, the analysis of the interaction between coyuntural and structural variables and vegetation restoration is not correct. They apply independent analysis (i.e. restoration vs temperature, vs restoration, vs rainfall, vs slope…) and with this type of analysis the can not really know which variables have more influence on the restoration process, since they are all related and interdependent. They could have applied, for example, a logistic regression, which has been successfully applied in numerous studies and has demonstrated Good results for estimating the explanatory capacity of the predictor variables. The individual relationships observed are well-known, (i.e. high severity areas have lower regeneration, shady slopes are better…)  but the importance is in the interactions and this is not provided.

The discussion section needs to increase significantly the reference to other authors. This section is more a summary of results rather than a discussion of the results with previous research.

 

English needs to be revised and some figures of the text have spelling mistakes.  

Author Response

Dear Editor, Dear reviewers，

Thank you for your letter. We were pleased to know that our work was rated as potentially acceptable for publication in Journal, subject to adequate revision. We thank the reviewers for the time and effort that they have put into reviewing the previous version of the manuscript. Their suggestions have enabled us to improve our work. Based on the suggestions and comments in your letter, We have revised the paper substantially. Therefore, we have uploaded a revised manuscript in which all revisions are marked in red font。 Appended to this letter is our point-by-point response to the comments raised by the reviewers.We would like also to thank you for allowing us to resubmit a revised copy of the manuscript.

We hope that the revised manuscript is accepted for publication in the Forests.

Sincerely,
Zhili Chen

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This study aims to map the changes in arbor and shrub vegetation affected by fire and quantify the effects of climatic and topographical factors on vegetation restoration and recovery. Using sentinel-2, derived indices and two algorithms were also used (i.e. K means, SVM) in conjunction with burn severity data to successfully map change over a 13 month period. High-resolution historical images were also used to assess the effects of slope, aspect and climate using a multiple regression analysis.

The paper requires moderate revisions and improved clarity on the introduction, methods and results sections. Specific comments below.

 

Abstract

 

1.     Lines 13-14 “This study aimed to monitor and quantify the effects of climatic and topographic factors and fire severity after fires on early (within 1 year) arbor and shrub community restoration.”

Please improve readability above. I suggest “climate, topographic factors and fire…..”

Remove “after fires”

 

2.     Lines 17. “US Forest Service; effects of climate and slope aspect on…”

I suggest this be broken into two or more sentences.

           

3.     Lines 20-24. Some repetition related to “arbor and shrub community” can be reduced and the text made concise. Also the results from the K means and SVM should be clearly stated upfront.

 

Introduction

4.     LINE 53. Should be “Applestein et al. (2021)”

Line 59: “Danielle” same as above

5.     Line 62. “…seedling abundance [17]. And the dry climate….”

This should be one sentence.

Line 67. “]. And wildfires provide a new scenario for species competition.”

Avoid sentences beginning with “And”, rather try incorporate this in the above/below text. See lines 77, 101 as well.

 

6.     Lines 76. “red-edge band data (B5, B6, B7)” – please include spectral ranges of these.

 

Methods

7.     Line 156. “California landcover map in 2019” – what was the overall accuracy of the dataset and which sensor was used. Please add.

 

8.     Lines 165.  should be “vegetation pixels of spatiotemporal features” ?

 

9.     Line 194. Please clarify or rephrase. The indices were used as input variables in the classification process?

 

Results and Discussion

10.  Line 279. Which textural features were used? Was the SVM applied in comparison with the k mean algorithm on the same data variables? Please elaborate and clarify.

11.  Line 306. Table 4 – is this from K means or SVM? The comparison between these two algorithms are not clear through the paper and the results should be stated up front from the abstract through to the results and conclusion.

12.  Line 519/520. I would have expected some discussion on how the accuracy of this study compared to those obtained by previous studies dealing with veg restoration after or before fires?

13.  I may have missed any shortcoming of this study in the discussion and how they can be improved in future and what direction can future studies aim to investigate.

Author Response

Dear Editor, Dear reviewers，
Thank you for your letter. We were pleased to know that our work was rated as potentially acceptable for publication in Journal, subject to adequate revision. We thank the reviewers for the time and effort that they have put into reviewing the previous version of the manuscript. Their suggestions have enabled us to improve our work. Based on the suggestions and comments in your letter, We have revised the paper substantially. Therefore, we have uploaded a revised manuscript in which all revisions are marked in red font。 Appended to this letter is our point-by-point response to the comments raised by the reviewers.We would like also to thank you for allowing us to resubmit a revised copy of the manuscript.
We hope that the revised manuscript is accepted for publication in the Forests.
Sincerely,
Zhili Chen

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Evaluating effects of post-fire climate and burn severity on the early-term recovery of arbor and shrub communities in the San Gabriel Mountains of California from Sentinel-2(MSI) images

Dear Authors

The basic science of this paper is conducted in a good way and according to the journal scope. I reviewed this paper thoroughly and I found there are many English language problems.  The author used Sentinel-2 data to evaluate the effects of post-fire climate and burn severity in the San Gabriel Mountains of California, USA. The author used passive language in some parts. Many sentences are very long and can’t be readable. please split and write in good form.

There are extensive English mistakes. I suggested, that the author can use professional English services of MDPI or another or add an English native speaker to modify the language of this paper. I found some major and minor problems in this study. I added some major and minor comments to the pdf file.

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. I hope you will modify it very soon and resubmit it again in this journal.

I will just focus on my comments.

See pdf

Best Regards

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Editor, Dear reviewers，
Thank you for your letter. We were pleased to know that our work was rated as potentially acceptable for publication in Journal, subject to adequate revision. We thank the reviewers for the time and effort that they have put into reviewing the previous version of the manuscript. Their suggestions have enabled us to improve our work. Based on the suggestions and comments in your letter, We have revised the paper substantially. Therefore, we have uploaded a revised manuscript in which all revisions are marked in red font。 Appended to this letter is our point-by-point response to the comments raised by the reviewers.We would like also to thank you for allowing us to resubmit a revised copy of the manuscript.
We hope that the revised manuscript is accepted for publication in the Forests.
Sincerely,
Zhili Chen

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has substantially improved in the revised version. I do not have any more comments for the authors. 

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:
We are very grateful for your recognition. We thank the editor and reviewers for the valuable comments and suggestions. Your comments are very helpful to improve the quality of this article. as well as the important guiding significance to our research.
sincere regards
Zhili Chen

Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript: Forests-1737329

Title: Evaluating effects of post-fire climate and burn severity on the early-term recovery of arbor and shrub communities in the San Gabriel Mountains of California from Sentinel-2(MSI) images

I am happy to see all changes in the revised manuscript but still, there are some minor comments/suggestions. I hope the author will revise again as per my comments and suggestions.

I will just focus on my comments.

Abstract

1. In this study, we used Sentinel-2 (MSI) intensive time-series (add date) imagery to validate the classification results combined with 389 vegetation sample points on Google Earth Pro and fire maps provided by the US Forest Service.

2. (OA:?) explain first then you'll use the abbreviation

3. How to calculate OA and kappa, explain within 1 line before results.

 

Study area

4. Figure 1 is not appropriate.

5. Elevation (Dem show is good form

6. Why are temperature and rainfall weather stations at a different places. Check, please

7. Increase the size of latitude and longitude

8. Why did you add a RGB image. Its better present in elevation with 5 equal interval classes.

9. All maps at different scales then why did you put a single scale in this figure.

Methods

Table3; All references are not according to the journal format

Best Regards

 

Author Response

Dear Editors and Reviewers:
We thank the editor and reviewers for the valuable comments and suggestions. Your comments are very helpful to improve the quality of this article. as well as the important guiding significance to our research. We have studied the comments carefully and have made a correction which we hope meet with approval. Revised portions of the manuscript are highlighted by red color. Our detailed point-by-point responses to the reviewers' comments are given below.Please see attachment for changes.
sincere regards
Zhili Chen

Author Response File: Author Response.docx