The Need to Establish a Social and Economic Database of Private Forest Owners: The Case of Lithuania

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Dear authors, 

Your manuscript has been significantly improved and I will recommend to be accepted. I hope that you will proceed working in this field revealing at sustainable management of forests.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

 

We are very grateful for your comments as they point out to an important rationale of the paper and broaden our view for further research as well.

Point 1: Your manuscript has been significantly improved and I will recommend to be accepted. I hope that you will proceed working in this field revealing at sustainable management of forests.

Thank you again for your care and previous comments and suggestions. We truly hope that now our paper looks better

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Dear authors,

I can see a significant improvement of the paper.

Please pay attention to English, using of bold text and formating issues to be in accordance to journal requirements. The weak part is the concluding one. I would suggest to re-write the part of Conclusions. Some sentences are really hard to follow + the wording only udnerestimates the paper as a whole. It only refers to the limits of the study, which should be only a part of it.

 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

 

We are very grateful for your comments as they point out to an important rationale of the paper and broaden our view for further research as well.

Point 1: I can see a significant improvement of the paper. The weak part is the concluding one. I would suggest re-writing the part of Conclusions. Some sentences are really hard to follow + the wording only underestimates the paper as a whole. It only refers to the limits of the study, which should be only a part of it.

 

We apologize for the weak part of the conclusions; we improved this part of our manuscript.

Point 2: Please pay attention to English, using of bold text and formatting issues to be in accordance to journal requirements.

 According to your suggestions, we paid attention and tried to improve all the text under journal requirements.

 

Thank you again for your care, comments and suggestions. We truly hope that now our paper looks better

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

The topic of your manuscript is addressing one of the biggest challenges of our days - how to sustainable manage the forests and how to increase their potential in providing ecosystem services.

The general organization and the writing of the manuscript are of enough clarity. Some minor revision could further improve its readability. You can find in the following some specific remarks (line numbers in the manuscript are shown).

Lines 12-13: Why Devrim Elvan is mentioned here as a corresponding author as on the next line Dalia Perkumiene is marked as correspondence? Affiliation 4 is not described here.

Lines 37-42: Please, cite some references

Lines 92-93: Your aim is not very well described. Please, reconsider this sentence and highlight your goals.

Lines 94-98: I recommend to delete this text as your article follows the standard structure of a scientific manuscript.

Line 151:  Please, correct the following "Weiss et al. al., 2019 [17], a differentiate ..." as "Weiss et al. [17] have stated that ....."

Line 179: Please, correct the following "conducted by Mizaras et. al. 2020 confirms ..." as "... conducted by Mizaras et al. [34] confirms that ..."

Line 186: Please, correct the following "According to A. Kuliešius et al. (2011) [35], human needs ..." as "According to Kulesius et al. [35] ..."

Line 203: Pleas, correct the following "According to Riepšas E. (2012) [36] ..." as "According to Riepsas [36] .."

Line 208, 218, 240: Same as previous

Line 242: Please, correct "biodiversity was investigated by Juutinen, Tolvanen and Koskela (2020) in Finland [19]" as "biodiversity was investigated by Juutinen et al. [19] in Finland.."

Line 243: Please, correct "Thomas et al. (2022) [13] surveyed" as "Thomas et al. [13] surveyed .."

Line 276, 282, 284, 288, 291, 310, 312, 318, 324, 336: Same correction of citations as abovementioned

Line 491: Please, delete " ... and 4)" at the end of the sentence

Line 519: Please, correct ".. conducted by Mizaras et. al. 2020 confirms ..." as "... conducted by Mizaras et al. [34] ..."

Line 529: Same as previous

Line 507: I would like to recommend to merge Results and discussion in one section and to present the Conclusions alone (starting from Line 546)

Line 576: Please, check the Instructions for authors and correct where needed (Ref. 1, 2, 4, 5 , 8, 13, 14, etc.)

 

 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

firstly I would like to thank you for bringing out an interesting topic of private forest ownership. I personally agree that detailed information on PFOs are essential in order to ensure proper forest management.

However, after carefully going through the paper, I cannot recommend it for publishing. My comments are below:

- the paper itself appear to me as a draft, or pre-final version of the paper (level of English language, references in the text are not in line with MDPI standards (e.g. line 186, 208 and throighout the text), use of "we" instead of "it was done"...). Some words are not used in a proper way (forests are not felled - trees are logged or harvested; forest maintenance - probably forest tending, farming in forest? - probably forest management itself).

- the other issue is the literature review. Probably it should be shortened with the most important findings regarding the main article-line to be presented there and a summary of analysed documents could be a part of supplementary material

- why the reader does not get ANY information on forestry and PFOs and PFO associations in Lithuania? The problems PFOs face could be similar (European-wide), but the reader needs to have a regional context. Is it up to every PFO how to manage his/her forest? Or are there any restrictions regarding the legislation, being part of some association etc.

- There is a serious drawback in the methodological part. I do not mind qualitative research, but I do not think that describing you chose "experts" and where they work is enough. Why only 3 are representatives of owners? You also don´t give any detail on why these organizations are important. The questionnaire should be summarized in a different way, or - better - to be a part of the supplemetary material. Are 10 respondents enough (coming back to that that these people should represent PFOs and PFOs associations). I do not like the presentation of the Result using text in "sharp" brackets. The result should be concise and clear for the reader.

- In part 5. Discussion, the authors refer to information about situation in Lithuania (l. 511-515) that I am missing in the text (I did not remember I have seen it).

Based on the above mentioned, I have to reject the paper in this present form.