Fire’s Effects on Grassland Restoration and Biodiversity Conservation
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Yan and Liu (2021) have performed a bibliometric analysis on the effects of fire in grasslands. This review is within the scope of Sustainability and would be interesting to the readers of the journal. However, in my opinion, the manuscript needs several improvements before being suitable for publication.
Firstly, a careful English style check is necessary. I have pointed some inconsistencies below, but there are several others throughout the manuscript. Moreover, it is not clear if the authors are interested on the fire effects in the restoration of grasslands specifically or in the effects on other variables (e.g., resilience, distribution). Finally, I think the authors need to discuss in depth the effects of the fire management techniques that are being applied in Africa, Australia, and Brazil on grasslands. Please see the comments below for more details.
Line 55: Please change “associated to” to “associated with”.
Line 58: Please change “roles” to “role”.
Lines 60-61: Please define the considered past decades in here (1984 to 2010?).
Line 58: Ecosystems.
Line 70: Paleoecology? In a study from 1984 to 2020?
Line 74: Could you please define “grassland” in here? There are studies that consider savannas as grasslands, while other do not.
Line 76: “functioning,”
Line 77: Please change “in the past decades” to “over the past decades”.
Lines 77-78: Globally?
Line 80: “role the disturbances”. Which disturbances?
Line 82: Limitations on the understanding of responses? Which limitations?
Line 83: Please change “And regarding all factors controlling grassland distribution” to “Among all factors”
Line 84: Describe and understand. Restoration and dynamics.
Lines 87-88: Please define the distinct types of fires.
Line 88: Varies, not varied.
Line 215: I do not see the objective of this study so far. Only generic citations that are sometimes disconnected. Please add a paragraph in here defining your objective.
Line 218: Are you aiming to study the effects of fire on restoration, distribution, or dynamics of grasslands? Globally or in a specific area? Moreover, restoration is not defined so far.
Line 221: Beginning when?
Line 226: Did you read all of the 200 papers? Only 92 are cited in this review.
Lines 226-229: Why these journals were chosen?
Line 230: Fire effects on the restoration of grasslands? Not clear so far.
Lines 271-272: There are not 20 keywords in here.
Line 280: Name of the axis are missing in Figure 1. In 1C please add the entire name of the journal instead of an abbreviation.
Line 280: Figure 3 is misplaced. It appears before being called in the text.
Lines 98-99: Please give some examples of adaptation in here (do not know why lines numbering started again).
Line 173: Fire-adapted species?
Line 186: Found.
Line 189: Could not understand “by the time”.
Lines 195-198: I think this needs further development. There are several interesting studies on the effects of fire management techniques applied in the savannas of Australia, Africa, and Brazil.
Line 201: Releases, facilitates.
Line 204: “, while”.
Line 206: accelerate, and the fuel available.
Line 207: recurrence.
Line 211: grasses,
Lines 215-216: Could not understand this sentence.
Line 219: harder to.
Lines 224-280: Confusing sentence. Please rephrase.
Line 282: severe? several?
Line 292: Where is the Great Basin located?
Line 330: Effects of fire?
Lines 504-505: Did you compare grasslands and forests using the same approach? If not, this is not a conclusion of your work.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
First of all, I would like to appreciate the hard work done by the authors in drafting this manuscript. Please see my comments/suggestion in the attached pdf, to improve the quality of the manuscript.
My main suggestion for the authors is to make the distinction between wildfire and prescribed fire clear through out the manuscript. "Post-fire" recovery is vastly different between wildfire and prescribed-fire scenarios. So it's misleading to talk about post-fire recovery without stating what kind of fire your taking a particular citation from. In this kind of a review, you could easily go back and forth between observations/ results taken from wildfire and prescribed fire scenarios.
I felt the introduction section needs to be improved and provide a stronger justification why you conducted this review? How this results can be used, and get to that point back in the conclusion.
Please see the attached pdf. for additional comments.
Thank you
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I acknowledge the great effort of the authors in revising the manuscript. The quality has improved significantly. I still think the manuscript needs an in-depth English review provided by an English native-speaker.
Lines 29-31: South American savannas are missing.
