Trends in Brazil’s Forestry Education: Overview of the Forest Engineering Programs

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Comment

13

Use of the word “course” is misleading. I assume the authors are referring to forestry “programs”.

17

Unlikely, 13 professors per course, must be program.

18

No professional experience? Or no academic experience.

21

Candidates or applicants?

32

One scenario?

36-37

Highly recommend that the document undergo a strong language edit.

49

What course? What is being termed “the course”?

58-59

Many programs fit into “natural resources and environment”.

69-70

This assertion should have a citation.

84-85

Perhaps, this opinion should be left to the reader to make

90

How many?

100

I would place this information in an Annex or table

124

Not clear how number of professors could serve as a proxy for course structure?

133

Curriculum vitae?

138

Do you mean, any experience at all? OK, I see you answer that question in the next line. Surprising.

167

It would be interesting to understand the thinking behind this regression

175

What milestones?

175-179

This sentence mixes a lot of different ideas that don’t fit together in a logical way.

Figure 2

Looks like Caatinga has four programs

Figure 3

In the Y axis, put Graduates per year in…

203

What do you mean by “vacancy occupancy rate”?

205

Not necessary to indicate “varied by 800%. More important is to discuss how an undergraduate forestry program can function with 4 professors.

208

Not clear to me

Figure 4

In the Y axis for the three bar charts, you indicate “Frequency of courses (%), but aren’t they absolute numbers, not percentages?  

Figure 5

It looks like the one program with 35 professors has pulled up the regression line. Programs with 6-7 professors did great, while programs with 10 professors underperformed. I don’t think this finding is very useful.

216-225

This paragraph does present important findings. Figure 6 could be formatted a bit more clearly, clearly indicating the separation between the 60% group and the 40% group. Also, I suspect that the calculations are not correct. For example, in the red box, you would have to indicate the % of professors that work in the same university that have not experience. The red and brown boxes would have to add up to 100%, not 60%. The same logic would apply to the professors that work in different institutions.

242

But there are still more candidates than slots available.

Figure 8

Rather than Ano, put Year. Like in Figure 4, I would revisit the labelling of the Y axis. Why include information on the ranking of the University of Sao Paulo in the figure caption?

Section 3.3

This information, if included, should be explored to a greater degree. What makes this information important?

264

Since the number of programs has increased markedly in the past 20 years, perhaps the total number of applicants has not reduced as much as being implied. Rather, the applicants are distributed across a greater number of programs.

267-268

This seems to contradict what you stated above

281

Perhaps the forestry programs should adapt to include thematic areas students are more interested in.

292-299

This paragraph is quite speculative.

304

Indeed, this is a worrisome finding.

307-308

But you indicate that 100% lack necessary skills

310

What disparity?

314-315

To what degree are programs linking with forestry initiatives? Do students carry out their thesis with these initiatives?

Question

Are some of the other rapidly growing programs filling important gaps in the forestry sector, that are not being filled by forest engineering programs?

316-325

This paragraph includes a lot of topics and concepts that are not well tied together. Furthermore, the issues raised were not introduced earlier in the paper.

331-336

This is an important point that connects well with your findings.

345-346

This is another important point

Comment

A discussion on the difference between knowledge and skills/competencies would be interesting to integrate in this paper. Students and employers seem to want skills. Skills can only be developed through practice.

Comment

Connotation of “Forest Engineering” in Latin America versus other parts of the world. For example, in Latin America, I was always called “un ingeniero forestal”, but I had an undergraduate degree in Forest Biology and a masters in Forest Genetics. For an international audience, it would be important to indicate what is meant by Forest Engineer in the paper.

Comment

It is quite likely that many of the “courses” that are needed in the forestry sector, are found in other programs like “Natural Resources and the Environment"

350-351

What gap?

353

Until now, the paper really hasn’t explored “participatory approaches and societal involvement”, so the reader is unclear what is being proposed here.

357-358

In Brazil?

364-365

Wouldn’t required skills vary by context in a country like Brazil? Shouldn’t this be mentioned here?