Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper “Perception of urban trees by Polish tree professionals 2 vs non-professionals” provides a sort of taxonomy of the social acceptance of urban trees, differentiating for demographic and socio-economic characteristics of ad hoc survey respondents. The paper is well written and partially on line with the aim of Sustainability. Some doubts arise for the perfect fit of this paper with the journal in comparison with other journal of the same publisher (e.g. Forests). To solve this issue I would like to see more discussions on the role of the presence of urban trees for sustainable reasons, one possibility is to link this topic to the definition of sustainable indicators where the presence of green areas is a variable of a composite sustainable score as in Devitofrancesco et al., (2016). I then suggest to review the paper on the light of sustainability concept.

Author Response

Comments on the review by Reviewer 1

The paper “Perception of urban trees by Polish tree professionals 2 vs non-professionals” provides a sort of taxonomy of the social acceptance of urban trees, differentiating for demographic and socio-economic characteristics of ad hoc survey respondents. The paper is well written and partially on line with the aim of Sustainability. 

As we write in the Introduction of the manuscript:

“Trees are important part of urban ecosystem as environmentally sustainable and economically productive (Kirkpatrick et al 2013). Urban forest protection plays important role for enhancing ecosystem services as ‘biogenic’ or ‘green’ infrastructure in the process of making liveable and sustainable cities. Therefore, to protect urban forest means preserving and enhancing the livability of the city. Sustainable urban forests require a healthy tree and site condition, community-wide tree acceptance and support, but also a comprehensive management approach (Clark et al., 1997)”

 

Some doubts arise for the perfect fit of this paper with the journal in comparison with other journal of the same publisher (e.g. Forests). 

As far as we know the Forests journal is focused on forest related subjects such as forest production and management. 

To solve this issue I would like to see more discussions on the role of the presence of urban trees for sustainable reasons, one possibility is to link this topic to the definition of sustainable indicators where the presence of green areas is a variable of a composite sustainable score as in Devitofrancesco et al., (2016). 

The importance of urban forest for the urban sustainability was underlined in the Introduction of the manuscript. The sustainable indicators related to the urban forest and therefore sensible to the decision of tree professionals examined in the study were introduces.

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This article analyzes 'tree perception' survey results from general public and people responsible for tree planning in Poland, and may be of interest to anyone involved in sustainable urban forest or landscape planning, especially in countries with a mix of rural and large city components.  The largest issue is clarity of definitions, how respondents were selected, and more detail needed in the methods.  The results are so detailed that the repetition becomes difficult to read, but comparativly the methods are lacking key information defining terminology.    Some minor/moderate editing including the use of parenthesis, paragraph breaks, and table reformatting would improve article flow and readability.

Specifics by line number:

11-13; delete:, use ( and ) around respondent description instead.   

Keywords: 'tree professionals' sounds like arborists or foresters, but this is not really who you mean in the paper - this keyword and phrasing throughout should be more clearly defined and is one of the issues in the methods - urban planners or architects would be more descriptive and appropriate

Abstract does not include a statement if the professionals/non-professionals had similar results...

31: should be 'but also a comprehensive management approach (1).'

35: needs citations

45. start new paragraph after bias

56: start new paragraph after functions

48-49: ' and eastern Europe due to high rates of overcrowded dwellings.'

66,71,80, etc : for each subheader, should they read "Perceptions of Attractivness", "Perceptions of Social Relations" or attitudes to, something that clarifies what these are.  Attractiveness and Danger subheaders need at least one more sentence description each (seems not detailed enough).  Does Attractiveness also include increased housing markets and values?  Social relations sounds to really be describing public health. 

81. Delete first sentence in paragraph

93. danger section does not mention hazard tree removal commonly done in urban forest care, or risk of decay/disease although falling trees is mentioned.  Also, what about power lines?  this paragraph should have more detail to match the other sections. 

98-99 and methods.  More clearly define professionals - what titles do they have? how are construction planners tree specialists? What do they actually do with tree to make them specialists? do there backgrounds/degrees include tree ecology, maintanence or care?  Horticulture? otherwise they sounds like architects who occasionally include trees in their plans, but may or may not understand or know much about the species they are planning on. future design professionals (does this mean current students?), construction employees (what interactions do they have with trees?) and public officials making decisions about trees - I would assume these people have vastly different educational backgrounds and knowledge levels specifically about trees. they are NOT urban foresters, arbiculturits, or even parks and recreation managers and this needs to be more clearly defined or listed.  Perhaps instead of tree professionals, they are tree planning professionals, or some other wording. 

124. questions, leaving 184 answers

125 delete were

129. needs citation.  Also interesting given that 'green' studies in other countries (forestry) is very much dominated by men.  I would also be skeptical that architecture is dominated by women in the US (but would have to look it up). 

132 and all Table Captions.  Each table caption needs more detail, so that if they were read outside of context with the manuscript, they would make sense.  For table 1, for example, "Socio-demographic characteristics of 184 tree planning professionals in Poland who responded to a  perceptions of urban trees survey in 2015.", or something like that. 

Table 1 also is first mention of catagories of student, official, work contractor, designer (not defined in text), and Education categories of secondary and higher - (what are examples of degrees or programs people attended in these?)

133 non-professionals should be similarly explained as to how they were identified.  define IMAS international institute and what it does for non-polish readers. what were these citizens doing as a part of that?

table 2 formatting is off

189 latent variables based on professionals answers, but table in this section has a non-professional header.  is that intentional and that the pro's influenced the non-pro survey? if so this needs to be more clearly explained.

194-198 should be in a table

table 4; bold or italicise significant varibables in this table and throughout as you do in others for consistency. 

209-211 is discussion material 

217-221 again this information would be better presented in a table that is easier to read than in text format.  At the same time, many tables could likely be combined or reformatted to include more information in them and reduce the number of figures. 

226. do not start a sentence with a numeral

arboriphobes - should be defined, being the non-professionals came from a IMAS institute, does that mean that students are possibly arboriphobes?

Table 7: how is it that only significant results are presented, but % are reported for each? do you mean significant results are in bold? Since non selected is simply the inverse, is this a table that could be reformatted for more room?

Table 8,9, 10, 11 defining the clusters 1-4 is needed to understand the tables without searching in the text. 

Page 11-12.  the names of the clusters you have identified do make sense with the breakdown of data responses! % are not reported for the professional clusters like they are for the non-professionals.  Formatting the bullets with bold would help these stand out too. For example : bullet: "Cluster 1: Tree accepting: the respondants...." or more use of subheaders would help these really stand out and make it easier to find information for a reader

390, cluster 4 in non-professionals includes a category for tree experts - how can non-professionals be experts? might these be people educated as foresters, arborists, but not the tree-planning professionals? this leads back to who and how the people were chosen and defined in this study.

Discussion: redefine or follow through with clarification on who are the professionals and non-professionals

470 - so are the tree experts ecology students? that is a big deal if so and should be mentioned sooner!

475 towards trees was also presented in the studies

491-493 another exmaple that could be caused by the definition of non-professionals, bc this is a study tree planning professionals, not really tree care professionals, so it seems possible that a dendrology or ecology student at university could be in the non-professional category!

513, professionals is disturbing, but only small groups...

514  However, this result is still highly negative...

573. why is there higher public pressure in the smaller city instead of the largest cities? citation may be needed

575. general atiititude from Polish professionals

576 for both groups, tree

578 non-professionals lay in their division...

585. primary school in Poland. 

Discussion and Conclusion - does the literature support that similar results would be likly in other countries? what tree/ecological educational materials are listed in general education standards? should this be scaled up to other countries besides poland?

Reference numbers are repetitive, skip order, and are missing - manuscript goes to 55 atleast, but list stops at 50 - needs a serious revisit

Author Response

Comments on the review by Reviewer 2

This article analyzes 'tree perception' survey results from general public and people responsible for tree planning in Poland, and may be of interest to anyone involved in sustainable urban forest or landscape planning, especially in countries with a mix of rural and large city components.  The largest issue is clarity of definitions, how respondents were selected, and more detail needed in the methods.  The results are so detailed that the repetition becomes difficult to read, but comparativly the methods are lacking key information defining terminology.    Some minor/moderate editing including the use of parenthesis, paragraph breaks, and table reformatting would improve article flow and readability.

 

Respondents

Keywords: 'tree professionals' sounds like arborists or foresters, but this is not really who you mean in the paper - this keyword and phrasing throughout should be more clearly defined and is one of the issues in the methods - urban planners or architects would be more descriptive and appropriate

·       The term ‘tree professionals’ has been extensively explained in the paper (section Materials and Method).  

98-99 and methods.  More clearly define professionals - what titles do they have? how are construction planners tree specialists? What do they actually do with tree to make them specialists? do there backgrounds/degrees include tree ecology, maintanence or care?  Horticulture? otherwise they sounds like architects who occasionally include trees in their plans, but may or may not understand or know much about the species they are planning on. future design professionals (does this mean current students?), construction employees (what interactions do they have with trees?) and public officials making decisions about trees - I would assume these people have vastly different educational backgrounds and knowledge levels specifically about trees. they are NOT urban foresters, arbiculturits, or even parks and recreation managers and this needs to be more clearly defined or listed.  Perhaps instead of tree professionals, they are tree planning professionals, or some other wording. 

·       Corrected in section “Materials and Methods”

129. needs citation.  Also interesting given that 'green' studies in other countries (forestry) is very much dominated by men.  I would also be skeptical that architecture is dominated by women in the US (but would have to look it up). 

·       The explanation was given with the private information about the share of women in the landscape architecture studies in SGGW (our university). We did search for a more official citation but no statistical data on gender shares in the landscape architecture in Poland were available.

133 non-professionals should be similarly explained as to how they were identified.  define IMAS international institute and what it does for non-polish readers. what were these citizens doing as a part of that?

·       IMAS International is an market and public opinion research institute which operates on the Polish market since 1994. The company conducts face to face, CATI, CAPI and CAWI research, both qualitative and quantitative (www.imas.pl).

arboriphobes - should be defined, being the non-professionals came from a IMAS institute, does that mean that students are possibly arboriphobes?

·       Students were not a separate group in Polish citizen quota surveyed with the help of the IMAS public opinion research institute.

491-493 another exmaple that could be caused by the definition of non-professionals, bc this is a study tree planning professionals, not really tree care professionals, so it seems possible that a dendrology or ecology student at university could be in the non-professional category!

·       In accordance to the methodology of studies based on a random sample, it is possible that even a student of ecology (dendrology is a part of landscape architecture academic studies in Poland) can appear in the group of non-professionals.

 

Other issues

Specifics by line number:

11-13; delete:, use ( and ) around respondent description instead.   

·       Corrected

Abstract does not include a statement if the professionals/non-professionals had similar results...

·       It has been added

31: should be 'but also a comprehensive management approach (1).'

·       Corrected

35: needs citations

·       It has been added

45. start new paragraph after bias

·       Corrected

56: start new paragraph after functions

·       Corrected

48-49: ' and eastern Europe due to high rates of overcrowded dwellings.'

·       Corrected

66,71,80, etc :

1.     for each subheader, should they read "Perceptions of Attractivness", "Perceptions of Social Relations" or attitudes to, something that clarifies what these are.

a.      Corrected

2.     Attractiveness and Danger subheaders need at least one more sentence description each (seems not detailed enough). 

a.      Additional sentences were added.

3.     Does Attractiveness also include increased housing markets and values? 

a.      No, Attractiveness did not include increased values so the “and increased property values” statement was removed. 

4.     Social relations sounds to really be describing public health. 

a.      The “Social relations” variable was renamed in the manuscript as “Socio-economic contributions” (or “Socio-economic benefits”) following the publication of Kirkpatrick, Davison and Daniels (Landscape and Urban Planning 107, 147-158, 2012): “There is an ample literature demonstrating that trees in urban areas make significant economic, environmental, social, cultural and spiritual contributions to the well-being of people and other sentrient beings.”

81. Delete first sentence in paragraph

·       Corrected

93. danger section does not mention hazard tree removal commonly done in urban forest care, or risk of decay/disease although falling trees is mentioned.  Also, what about power lines?  this paragraph should have more detail to match the other sections. 

·       We assumed that problem of  tree crown removal in collisions with utility lines applies only to professional duties. From the point of view of city residents, that kind of collision may be important in the context of tree aesthetics loss or value loss due to excessive cuts. We assumed that utility pruning is perceived as disservices rather than danger, and include: e.g. maintenance costs and light attenuation or infrastructure damage (Sudipto et al., 2012). Therefore, we think that too much detail in the paragraph will not improve its readability.

124. questions, leaving 184 answers

·       Corrected

125 delete were

·       Corrected

132 and all Table Captions.  Each table caption needs more detail, so that if they were read outside of context with the manuscript, they would make sense.  For table 1, for example, "Socio-demographic characteristics of 184 tree planning professionals in Poland who responded to a  perceptions of urban trees survey in 2015.", or something like that. 

·       More detailed descriptions were given. Unfortunately, some captions became very long

Table 1 also is first mention of catagories of student, official, work contractor, designer (not defined in text), and Education categories of secondary and higher - (what are examples of degrees or programs people attended in these?)

·       Corrected in section “Materials and Methods”

table 2 formatting is off

·       We do not see problems with formatting of Table 2 but of current Table 7 (previously Table 6) which has been reformatted

189 latent variables based on professionals answers, but table in this section has a non-professional header.  is that intentional and that the pro's influenced the non-pro survey? if so this needs to be more clearly explained.

·       Short explanation added: “In order to perform a comparison of the perception of urban trees by tree professionals vs non-professionals, the same definition of the latent variables was further applied in the case of the non-professionals.”

194-198 should be in a table

·       Corrected – Table 4

table 4; bold or italicise significant varibables in this table and throughout as you do in others for consistency. 

·       Corrected

209-211 is discussion material 

·       Corrected – text has been removed

217-221 again this information would be better presented in a table that is easier to read than in text format.  At the same time, many tables could likely be combined or reformatted to include more information in them and reduce the number of figures. 

·       Corrected – added into Table 4

·       Previous Tables 8 & 9 and Tables 10 & 11 were combined

226. do not start a sentence with a numeral

·       Corrected

Table 7: how is it that only significant results are presented, but % are reported for each? do you mean significant results are in bold? Since non selected is simply the inverse, is this a table that could be reformatted for more room?

·       The significance in the Fisher’s test corresponds to the whole demographic variables. In this case they were only Age and Education – only they were dependent with the respondent’s choice of the “There are too few trees in the cities” statement. The bold in the table shows for each demographic variable which cells in the contingency table were responsible for the departure from independence of the examined variables. Table 7 (currently Table 8) has been simplified.

Table 8,9, 10, 11 defining the clusters 1-4 is needed to understand the tables without searching in the text.

·       Definitions of clusters were added. Still, we are not 100% convinced that they should be added because

o   It is the tables that allow us define the clusters, hence it seems strange that they are already defined in the headings of the tables

o   Currently, the headings of the tables are large

Page 11-12.  the names of the clusters you have identified do make sense with the breakdown of data responses!

·       J

% are not reported for the professional clusters like they are for the non-professionals. 

·       We do not see which % because shares of clusters were given in line 310. Please, do clarify if we miss something

Formatting the bullets with bold would help these stand out too. For example : bullet: "Cluster 1: Tree accepting: the respondants...." or more use of subheaders would help these really stand out and make it easier to find information for a reader

·       Corrected

390, cluster 4 in non-professionals includes a category for tree experts - how can non-professionals be experts? might these be people educated as foresters, arborists, but not the tree-planning professionals? this leads back to who and how the people were chosen and defined in this study.

·       We used a wrong naming. “Tree experts” was changed to “Tree omnibus” as the cluster members seem to recognize all benefits and harms related to trees.

470 - so are the tree experts ecology students? that is a big deal if so and should be mentioned sooner!

·       The confusion resulted from wrong naming of “Tree experts” cluster. The name was changed to “Tree omnibus” – see above.

475 towards trees was also presented in the studies

·       Corrected

513, professionals is disturbing, but only small groups...

·       Corrected

514  However, this result is still highly negative...

·       Corrected

573. why is there higher public pressure in the smaller city instead of the largest cities? citation may be needed

·       The question of higher public pressure in the smaller city instead of the largest cities stays unclear. In the literature, the city size problem is analyzed from a different angle, e.g. the dependence of the size of the city on the value of the real estate is examined. We believe that the main reasons are due to different population in Polish smaller and largest cities. Some of the possible reasons may be:

o   Smaller cities in Poland = older people (due to depopulation) Although, there was no dependence on the age found in our study, in study of Oliveira Fernandes (2018) older respondents were more likely to perceive trees as dangerous.

o   Largest cities = trees are more valuable because of their smaller quantity

·       Unfortunately, even after deeper literature search we did not find factors that could definitely explain that phenomena and we believe that it requires additional research.

575. general atiititude from Polish professionals

·       Corrected

576 for both groups, tree

·       Corrected

578 non-professionals lay in their division...

·       Corrected

585. primary school in Poland.

·       Corrected

Discussion and Conclusion - does the literature support that similar results would be likely in other countries? what tree/ecological educational materials are listed in general education standards? should this be scaled up to other countries besides Poland?

·       Discussion added

Reference numbers are repetitive, skip order, and are missing - manuscript goes to 55 atleast, but list stops at 50 - needs a serious revisit

·       Number of references was adequate, the problem was connected with final formatting of the file – reference numbers have been automatically mistaken. Now they are carefully corrected and supplemented.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Much clearer explanations and editing has improved manuscript throughout.