Riparian Forests of Alnus Species Communities and Their Role in Sustainability in the Romanian Carpathians and Adjacent Regions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Article titled “Riparian forests of Alnus species communities and their role in sustainability in the Romanian Carpathians and adjacent regions” looks very interesting, however, there are many formatting errors in the article. I don't think the present manuscript is acceptable for publication.

My main comments are as follows：

1.     The font format of the full text looks very uncomfortable, and I hope the author changes to the unified format of the journal.

2.     In line 23, lack of a full stop.

3.     References are not standardized, for example 44,47 corresponding websites can be placed in the text, rather than as references.

4.     In 488, Table S1 should be placed in an attachment by itself, not at the end of the text.

5.     What is the purpose of the author's research in this paper? Is there a good strategy to deal with sustainable development? These problems should be discussed and analyzed in the discussion.

6.     What software is used to draw Figure 4, etc., and the corresponding references need to be explained and referenced in the method.

7.     The subtitle of the results is too short and needs to highlight the content of the findings.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

English needs to be polished and scrutinized.

Author Response

Thank you for taking the time to review this manuscript. We appreciate your valuable and helpful suggestions for revising and improving our manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

BRIEF SUMMARY

In my review I also present the remarks/corrections that the authors should follow in order to improve the quality of their work and become this manuscript suitable for publication in “Sustainability” Journal.

SPECIFIC COMMENTS

1. Line 8: Check the instructions of the journal, maybe you should write the e-mail addresses of all the authors.
2. Abstract: The authors describe here a part of their results, but they should point which is the main problem which is solved in this research.
3. Introduction: There is a very detailed description of similar studies. The authors should write the difference between their manuscript and these studies.
4. Line 31: Replace “[1, 2, 3]” with “[1-3]”.
5. Line 68: Replace “[25, 1, 2, 26, 21]” with “[1, 2, 21, 25, 26]”.
6. Line 82: Write “[32]” in black font, not red.
7. Line 105: Did you take into account the climatological conditions? Did they effect the results? I believe the authors should point here why they chose this research area.
8. Results: It is important the authors to compare their results with the available one, or to present a comparison between experimental and computational results. A statistical analysis, by using the coefficient R², could be useful in this point.
9. Lines 175, 204, 251, 288, 455 and 457: Avoid to use words like “we”, “our”, “us” etc. as they should selfish. Replace “We gathered” with “were gathered”, i.e. “Vegetation data from…from the literature were gathered: Follow this in the whole text.
10. Line 194: Why didn’t you follow the normal order, i.e., “Figures 4-6” and not “Figures 4, 5 and 7”?
11. Lines 248: You present data from period 1941-1961. Don’t you have more recent results?
12. Table 1, Line 254: What exactly is “”Eigenvalue”?
13. Figure 9: Please include the whole Figure, with its title/explanation, in the same page. Follow this for all Figures/Tables.
14. CONCLUSIONS: This paragraph must be extended. The authors should point the original parts of their work and their contribution in the existing literature. Why is this work important? Which are the new results/conclusion? A general conclusion considering the whole text is important to be written.
15. REFERENCES: Please check that all the references (names of authors and journals, titles, numbers of volumes and pages) are correct. Also check if you have followed the instructions of the journal about how to write the references. Did you really use all these references? Usually 80 references are presented in review papers. I believe you could reduce the number of the references, as enough of them don’t have big similarities with this study.

I would like to check the revised version

Author Response

Thank you for taking the time to review this manuscript. We appreciate your valuable and helpful suggestions for revising and improving our manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

All in the MS

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for taking the time to review this manuscript. We appreciate your valuable and helpful suggestions for revising and improving our manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The author should carefully checks the text for typos and the format of the references. The author has settled most of the issues and I have no further comments. 

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback and for acknowledging the improvements made. We have carefully checked the text for typos and have also ensured the proper formatting of references.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Accept in present form

Author Response

Thank you for your feedback.