Ecosystem Services of Mangroves: A Systematic Review and Synthesis of Contemporary Scientific Literature

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research is novel and can be recommended for publication.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive feedback and appreciation. 

Reviewer 2 Report

This a short review which gives fare idea on the ecosystem services provided by the mangroves and their integration with MES. I really enjoyed reading the text and the infographics are very well presented. I have few comments. Please check the attachment for the comments. Thank you.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive comments and feedback. We have added/updated your suggested changes. We hope you find the revised manuscript suitable for publication. 

Reviewer 3 Report

This manuscript conducted a bibliometric analysis of the ecosystem services of mangroves. The authors have classified the recent publications into different categories according to the ecosystem service types and linkage of SDGs. It gives an overview of recent hot spots in the research on mangroves. I believe this study can enhance the understanding of the important functions of mangroves, especially in the context of climate regulation, carbon storage, etc. It may attract attention from researchers in this study field.

I have one major concern about the methods. The authors used Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient to analyze the relationship between mangrove ecosystem services based on the likely trade-offs and synergy. It is difficult to understand the approach. What is the input of Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient? The collected studies are located in different regions. Their results of different ecosystem services may not be comparable. Please explain the approach in the method section clearly.  

There are some issues regarding text and figures, e.g. spelling mistakes, lack of legend of Figure 2, etc. I have marked them in the manuscript. I’m not an English native speaker. It could be necessary to proofread it by a native speaker.

 

In general, the authors have done a very good review work about mangroves. With deeper data mining, more contributions could be drawn to the protection and restoration of the mangrove landscape, for example, different conservation strategies should be adopted based on the classification of mangroves. The authors can mention it in the discussion part. I would recommend minor revisions.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive and insightful comments.  We are glad to know that you liked the manuscript. Regarding the query on Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient, we simply used the count of specific ecosystem services from each paper. The reason we used the Spearman correlation coefficient is that it is the best-established method to understand the monotonic relationship or association between two variables and the distribution is non-normal. In addition, some other previous studies also used such a method to find synergies and trade-offs in ecosystem services.  Nonetheless, we agree and acknowledge that such reporting may have some bias since we did not consider the spatial-temporal variation of studies. We have therefore added some explanation to the limitation. In addition, we also checked and corrected some grammatical mistakes.

Reviewer 4 Report

Mangrove has its specific ecosystem on their typology, distribution, and utilization. This paper gives a scientific literature based on Scopus database. It is shown that Mangrove needed to be pretected based on their specific localization.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your positive comments and feedback. 

Reviewer 5 Report

# this paper content important contribuitions about decomposition study, however, it is suggested that the authors comment mainly on the CO2 estimates. There are discussions in the text, but I understand that they are insufficient.

# I recommend authors will used a new table (ANOVA or other test) for comparison the using the control experiment.

# I not agree with discussion funded lines #220 and #221. There are a lot discussion specially in literature the tropical ecosystems

 

Author Response

1. Thank you very much for your comments. Please find our responses below:  The reason our research paper discusses the most about CO2 estimates and carbon sequestration is that it denotes the highest coefficient of correlation with other ecosystem services. So, we just explained the findings. Broadly speaking, carbon sequestration (or the so-called blue carbon)  is the most discussed mangrove ecosystem service in the literature which has strong synergies with other ecosystem services. 
2. As per our understanding, the ANOVA test is used to conduct the analysis of variance, whereas the objective of our research is to understand the relationship between different ecosystem services of mangrove ecosystems (i.e. synergies and trade-offs).