Quantifying the Use of Forest Ecosystem Services by Local Populations in Southeastern Cameroon
, Cédric Vermeulen 1, Adeline Fayolle 1, Pierre Jamar 1, Samuel Hette 1, Arielle Nkodo 1, Kevin Maréchal 1, Marc Dufrêne 1 and Patrick Meyfroidt 2,3
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is an example of ES assessment and mapping. However, it is not just a ‘paper about papers’ but also provides some further analysis and attempts to extract the most important results.
It is very well written and is well balanced between the different topics. It definitely deserves to be published and is a valuable contribution to the Sustainability journal.
It is difficult to point specifically to omittable sentences as they are rather spread throughout the paper, but I recommend making one more effort to shorten the paper at least somewhat, in order to make it more readily accessible.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is interesting and I've only some comments to do:
- You I've not considered medicinal or wild food plants as a high priority for integrated ES assessment ("as perceptios of ES supply were highly homogeneous among respondents"). I find this statement a little bit strange because African rural communities usually rely on these ethnobotanical resources for their livelihood. The same consideration could be done for Baka people (see the papers of Sandrine Gallois). Could you explain this point better?
- Please add environmental characteristics (mean temperature, annual rainfall, rainfall distribution, etc.) and information on the dominant vegetation and the forest characteristics of the study area in Materials and Methods.
- "We converted the measures of firewood mass into volume based on the measure of the basic density of 21 samples of firewood". How did you choose these samples to be measured?
- Why did you not consider the botanical species used as firewood or wood in the house construction? Are some species preferred over others? This would have been interesting in order to verify the conservation status of the ecosystem.
- You tested five socio-demographic variables but you did not consider age and gender. Why? Many activities are gender-based and the age of informant usually affects the perception and the use of the ecosystem (see, for example, the papers of Sandrine Gallois on Baka people).
- "5% of small livestock. Please specify which small animals.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Sustainability-728707: Depicting the use of forest ecosystem services by local populations in southeastern Cameroon
This manuscript provides very interesting information for a little studied area. It uses an integrated mixed methods approach using field measurements and qualitative instruments to study the “socio-ecological” dynamics of ecosystem service/NCP use by some communities near a forest reserve. It is fairly well written and provides insights to these little studies forest communities subsisting from tropical forests. I enjoyed reading the results and discussion. But there are 2 main issues that need to be addressed before the reader (reviewer) can conclude if the results are tenable.
First, there is little background and justification for the study. Why are these socio-ecosystems important, but little studied? Where else in other tropical forests have these types of studies been done (state of the art) and how have they done these studies (methods) and what have they found? Both in the abstract and Introduction you immediately go into the aim and objectives without giving the reader sufficient background and justification. Adding more detail on previous methods that have been used in other studies will be useful in addressing the following other point.
Second, the methods are often vague (non-transparent) and not presented systematically. In particular, methodologies and analyses are poorly explained and justified and the use of “integrated Assessment” is not defined and explained. You mention interviews and surveys and “biophysical methods” (without introducing or detailing what these biophysical methods are) and you then surprise the reader by presenting a household census, bushmeat use observations, GPS mapping and then interview/survey instruments leaving the reader confused. The statistics are also poorly justified and explained. I suggest you first justify and define what you mean by “integrated” and then develop a schematic figure that systematically lays out the order you implemented your methods. This order should be defined by the sequence in which you present your study objectives. At the end any reader should be able to repeat your methods and obtain similar findings elsewhere. I think this is one of the more interesting aspects of this manuscript and you should lay out and guide other so that they too can use it. Otherwise, this lack of detail, lack of justification and clarity, brings into question your findings.
Below I provide some specific comments that will hopefully help you improve your manuscript.
Title: Perhaps, “Use of ecosystem services by local populations near a forest reserve in southeastern Cameroon”
Abstract
Line (L) 16: I do not know if one ever “reaches” sustainability so it would be better to state “improve” or something similar. You also need to define what you mean by “integrated assessment”, that is what is it you are integrating?
L15-17: Please provide more background and justification for you study. You immediately state you aims in the third line but aside from the previous issues, you still have not provided the reader background. Use “characterise” or “describe”, rather than “depict”.
L 19-20: present your sample sizes here.
L 24. This is a very broad and inconclusive range; use mean or median instead.
L 26: The example you provide no not seem “spatial”
L 94: delete “prone”. Just say they are related..
L 96-97: Please justify and cite, how and why the use of participatory qualitative methods (interviews and surveys) is the appropriate method to capture these cultural service and provide some examples and findings from other parts of the tropics. This needs to be relevant o an international readership- not just African.
L 98: Why is the Dja area worth studying and what is a “forest allocation”?
L 98-105- This should go in the discussion section.
L 107. If you are going to assess ecosystem services mapping, you need to present this topic in the introduction.
L 109: Use “drivers” instead of determinants as this is more in line with the ecosystem services framework
L 115-116: You need to specify and define what a “social and biophysical assessment” is as written. You also need to elaborate more on what NCP is, its background (IPBES) and how and why it differs from the more conventional ecosystem service assessment approach in contexts such as Congo.
L 129-130. Please present or estimate the number of inhabitants in the 2 populations in the study area. Or mention if or why this information is not available since many readers from the Global North do not understand this reality.
L 134. Please describe to non-African readers, the ecological forest types found in the study area.
L 155-164. Try to provide a population estimate for the actual village you studied. This will help assess the representativeness of your qualitative methods.
Section 2.2. The method description is much too general and vague. The methods you use need to be repeatable and transparent. You need to specify “biophysical methods” and your interview and survey instruments. How many items or questions did they contain? Were they open, or structured. How did you develop, design and test them? Why not just interviews? What guidelines and protocols did you follow in their design and implementation- please cite them. How did you account for representativeness of the village population?
L 181. Does “exhaustive” mean you visited 100% of the village households then?
L 181-187. Is this what the interviews were for? Or the survey? You need to specify what data were obtained from what instrument.
Section 2.2.2 Again how or what instrument (if any) did you use to measure all of this? Is this the “biophysical” component of your integrated assessment (2.2.2.2.2.5)? Perhaps this should be indicated using a subtitle.
L 268: Why a univariate linear regression? It seems you have categorical data and small sample sizes. Are you meeting the assumptions: normality, Homoscedacity, muilticollineairty, etc? Please specify.
L 276: Please specify this geospatial data.
Table 1: How about including ha of deforestation or protected area in your statistical analysis?
Figure 3. I do not understand what you mean by “bought”? Purchased you mean? Is this cultural service typology based on the millennium ecosystem assessment or IPBES’ NCP concept?
Fig 4. Very nice and informative figure.
L 380-382: Where is the data and results that show this to be the case?
L 384-386. Why not include these areas in Figure 4?
L 421-424. In order to determine bush meat sustainability you also need to account for the animal’s sex and breeding potential? Perhaps say something about this.
L 493. Note: you consistently use “cultural ecosystem services” up to this point. Now you bring in NCP suddenly. So since you do this you now need to state which typology is more appropriate- NCP or Ecosystem Services?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
This is an excellent paper based on a good studies. Of course, it is always possible to find limits and comments to be made.
In your case, I would have been happy to have data on the ES capacity to relate the Use, but this would require another complementary study.
My main remarks is for the Page 8 line 313 comments on educational services that mention "Hunting techniques and NTFP gathering" as important knowledge ES. But they are not Cultural ES, they related to societal sphere not the ecosystem one. It is knowledge about practices.
A second relate to the abstract where the unsustainability of bushmeat is underrated by comparison to the discussion results.
Some attention could also have been done between the evidence of deforestation (figure 4) in protected areas.
My recommendation is to accept this paper.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is ready to be published
Author Response
Thanks for your review and comments.
Reviewer 3 Report
All my comments were incorporated.
I would suggest you break up some of the paragraphs to improve readability as they are very long and tiring to read at times. Also you should include the study area name in your Table and Figure titles and other necessary information so that the reader does not have to read text to know what they are and where they are from. Finally in your title, use "characterise" instead of "depict" so that it matches the terms you use in your methods.
One last comment is to briefly justify the use of TEEB in the Introduction. TEEB is simply not commonly used for there types of assessments whereas the MEA typology and more recent NCP are. Nothing extensive but perhaps you can provide insights for others in the Global south so that we do not have to assume a priori that the MEA is the default and most appropriate typology for these tropical contexts.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
