Will “Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”? White Oak (Quercus alba) Biology in the Anthropocene
, John M. Lhotka 4, Laura E. DeWald 4, Tetyana Zhebentyayeva 2,4, Beant Kapoor 3, Austin M. Thomas 5, Drew A. Larson 6, Denita Hadziabdic 3, Seth DeBolt 7, C. Dana Nelson 8,* and John E. Carlson 9,10,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear authors,
Great thanks for providing this good work. I prepared some comments and the file was attached.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
Will “Tall Oaks from Little Acorns Grow”? White Oak (Quercus alba) Biology in the Anthropocene.
This is a comprehensive review paper on Quercus alba. It provides extensive references and well reviews the state of knowledge of Q. alba biology and well identifies several gaps in knowledge.
As per the authors the “review presents an overview of the current understanding of the biology of Q. alba from previous, ongoing, and future research perspectives, encompassing distribution, phylogeny, population structure, key traits adapted to the cyclical environmental conditions (including water-use, reproduction, propagation, growth), and responses to biotic and abiotic stresses” among other data. As it is this a fairly broad for a review and encompasses a vast amount of information. This gets further broadened as the authors go on describe general oak biology and genetics instead of focussing on just Quercus alba (eg see Introduction, line 43-97; section 2 (110-165) line 405-460; genetics (618-770) among others). Further the paper spans from the fairly theoretical (the general biology section), to dealing with fairly practical and applied issues (the latter sections after genetic) and tree improvement.
Consequently, the paper loses focus a little bit. The reader is sometimes lost as to the direction in which the authors are taking them. Discussions on bourbon making (line 150-165) for example, while very interesting, do nothing to add to the central theme of the paper. Similarly the sections on oak biology - Section 3 – Regeneration and recruitment; Section 4 – Climate change and Stress biology ; Section 5 – Climate relevant traits - don’t really tie together. Some tightening and linking up of these sections will help. Excess verbiage and information in the early sections leads to a loss of focus and important points do not come through as clearly as they should.
While reviews of course need to provide overviews on current stage of knowledge and hence are generally a bit broad – this paper goes just a bit too far. There is a need to focus in. A single paper cannot cover, and should not try to cover, all of oak biology. I would urge the authors to do an edit, focus more on Q. alba, and less on describing general biology and ecological.
Editing needs to be improved. Eg in several places references are not in brackets [] (eg [14] in line 84; [118] in line 339 ; or have some error (eg [123] is partly in italics in line 348. In some places bits have been transposed (eg .org in line 221 should be in line 222). Heading (section numbering/bold) missing in section “Conclusions& Perspectives” (line 970). Use of citations is not uniform – in places author name is mentioned eg line176 “As posed in Abrams (2003) [33]….” Or line 986 which reads “They (Quine et al. [324]) proposed…” while in other places it is missed – for eg line 234 “Unlike four other northeastern oaks studied by [72], white oak is…”
Fig 1 needs better resolution (font size, clarity) and a slightly better explanation would help
Overall the paper is good - but I would strongly suggest some tightening and increase in focus so that the central theme stands out better.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe english is good and there are no problems with the language.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe paper presents a literature review concerning American white oaks biology and covering widest scope of topics from the oak wood utility to molecular genetics. Authors mention (line 983) that their review is shaped like that of Quine et al (2019) which is related to European white oaks. However, while Action Oak Knowledge review (Quine et al., 2019) is a whole book of almost 200 pages containing analysis of literature data and recommendations, this paper in its present form is more like an annotated bibliography lacking an analytical part. It can definitely be useful to students beginning their scientific career, but it is hard to imagine scholar who (with the help of search engines like WoS) could not compile even more complete list of references concerning his or hers particular field. Hence I doubt that this review is of interest to Forests readers.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe language is fine but minor editing is needed, especially concerning the use of square brackets.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsGreat job, now the text is much better
