Assessing and Mapping Forest Functions through a GIS-Based, Multi-Criteria Approach as a Participative Planning Tool: An Application Analysis

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper is well constructed, however, the introduction part needs improvement, authors have to presents recent MCDM methods, such as, Best Worst Method and Parsimonious Best Worst Method.

Regarding to the recent related works to AHP, Parsimonious AHP and recent literature review about AHP and fuzzy sets have to discussed.

 

-In the methodology section, a clear explanation of the application has to be presented.

 

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

This research is very well handled. It is written in a fluent and understandable style. There are a few minor fixes that need to be made. Nice work done.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

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Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript entitled “Assessing and mapping forest functions through a GIS-based, 2 multi-criteria approach as a participative planning tool. An application analysis” is very interesting. The structure is well organized. The authors present an innovative approach in assessing and mapping forest functions by combining the application of AHP and GIS. The methodological approach is described in details and the results correspond to the essence of the approach. 

I would like to draw author’s attention to some minor comments and suggestions:

1.    I suggest that the authors include more technical information about integrating AHP with GIS (some database structure, even a printscreen is suitable).

2.      Referring to fig.3 Rationale and sequential steps of the methodological approach applied in the case study, point 7. Drafting the local forest plan would you present some main issues/points of a draft local forest plan?

3.       I also would like the authors to present more details/explanation about the results based of fig. 5  (row 666) so that they could be clear enough for the readers.

4.      I suggest that the authors include more GIS maps for the spatially presentation of the results.

    Row 742. Forest planning as interfacing between nature and man, and  Row 815. Forest planning as interfacing between nature and man – Are the texts subtitles?  I suppose it is just a technical mistake

In my opinion the manuscript is relevant for the Journal Forests MDPI after minor revision

 Good luck!

Reviewer

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors did not discussed the presented works properly, only presenting is not enough even if you are not expert in MCDM, for instance, in the text you mentioned "Rezaei [48], for instance, has proposed the Best-Worst Method (BWM), which uses only the best and the worst criteria for the pairwise comparisons. With the BWM ", however, here you have to highlight the advantages and disadvantages over AHP and you have to justify why you have selected AHP over the other presented methods (BWM, PROMETHEE, ...), also I did not find the related works to Parsimonious AHP and Parsimonious BWM.

Make this part "updates on the wide range of MCDA" as a literature review part.

 

 

Author Response

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