A Socio-Ecological Approach to Conserve and Manage Riverscapes in Designated Areas: Cases of the Loire River Valley and Dordogne Basin, France

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I recommend that the authors carefully consider the real practice of managing such complex wetlands with high natural and cultural significance. A land use map should be shown to better understand these environmental issues.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments.

We widened our maps to show land use for each of the studied sites. We are open to adding additional information if needed. By working with the site managers, we are very close to the real practice of managing such complex wetlands with high natural and cultural significance.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear colleagues,

Thank you for the opportunity to read this manuscript, which brings into discussion a current topic, namely the socio-ecological approach to the conservation and management of river landscapes.

I have two suggestions for increasing the quality of the manuscript:

1. I suggest you write more clearly about the research gap in the introduction, what is missing in the specialized literature and what do you come up with new?

2. At the end of the discussions, I think that a paragraph should be included in which to mention what were the limitations of the study?! I did not capture this aspect in the manuscript and I consider it important to mention.

Sincerely,

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. Below are our responses:

1. I suggest you write more clearly about the research gap in the introduction, what is missing in the specialized literature and what do you come up with new?

• We actually have described the research gaps in detail (the entire paragraph began with « However, despite often being located inside the conservation... »). Still, we just added an explanatory phrase that we use this description of gaps to set up our study.” All these research gaps are addressed in this paper with two case studies of riverscape management, the Loire and Dordogne rivers “.

2. At the end of the discussions, I think that a paragraph should be included in which to mention what were the limitations of the study?! I did not capture this aspect in the manuscript, and I consider it important to mention it.

• We added the corresponding phrases:
• However, we are fully aware of the problem that solution approaches cannot be copy-pasted from one site to another. The social structure (and thereby, the decision-making process), the biophysical setting (thus, the precise type of the problem(s) to be settled), and the political setting (local to transboundary) and the societal “zeitgeist” (corresponding to the interest of the society in the proposed solutions) may differ considerably, as we discussed in the context of urban waterbodies and stream daylighting (Wantzen et al., 2019, 2022). A comparison of success stories of projects, taking into account these four “spheres”, may help to gain inspiration for innovative problem-solving in specific sites and represents the beginning of translational, transboundary, and transdisciplinary research, which is urgently needed to speed up the transfer of solutions from one site to others.

Reviewer 3 Report

This manuscript needs to following minor corrections:

1- Authors did not show any obtained result in abstract.

2- Authors did not state novelties and stages of this study obviously at the end of introduction.

3- Authors did not compare obtained results with results of other studies in this region.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, below are our responses:

1. Authors did not show any obtained result in abstract.

• We added some corresponding phrases in the abstract. « We show that the Loire River Valley and Dordogne River basin present positive examples for a transdisciplinary socio-ecological approach to conserving and managing riverscapes, integrating diverse stakeholder knowledge in participatory decision making, recognising the natural character of the river and coupling social and hydrological systems. The greatest achievement of the site managers is that they have built up trust and found feasible solutions satisfying the different interests of diverse stakeholders. Ingenuity and perseverance, combined with excellent communication skills, were the most important characteristics leading to success. 

2. Authors did not state novelties and stages of this study obviously at the end of introduction.

• Phrase added: « Contrary to the classical, evidence-based policies, which often suppose that detailed description of the problems suffices to leverage immediate action, the stepwise, multi-level and reiterative setting up of communication turned out to be the more sustainable procedure. »

3. Authors did not compare obtained results with results of other studies in this region.

• Our focus is the management of classified sites. To be honest, we have been working for several years on this question, along with the stakeholders. As far as we could find, the published data have been cited in the extensive bibliography and the detailed tables. We have, however, found one study that has been recently published: Peng, L. and Marinos, A., 2022. Exploration of cooperative management system of transregional cultural landscape heritage: a case study of Loire Valley between Sully-sur-Loire and Chalonnes. Built Heritage, 6(1), pp.1-23, and we cited this one. We also added this one: Gebauer, I. 2020. Regards de Loire. Paysages culturels du Val de Loire, ÉDITIONS 303, pp. 197-202. There is a plethora of reviews on the socio-ecological setting of both sites (including a large number of unpublished theses), which we preferred not to cite individually for place reasons, and as these have been recently thoroughly revised in the book chapters and revisions which we have cited (Moatar et al 2021, Wantzen et al in press, Berton& Rodrigues 2021 for the Loire, Michau et al in press for the Dordogne) »