Accurate Calculation of Upper Biomass Volume of Single Trees Using Matrixial Representation of LiDAR Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors

Many thanks for your very sound and up-to-date, innovative and interesting methodical manuscript.

Your manuscript soundly presents and innovative and improved combination of mathematical and geometrical methods to model and calculate the AGB of single trees based on dense Lidar point clouds. The conceptual idea, the methods, the analysis, and the conclusions drawn are well structured and scientifically soundly presented. Congratulation.

Your manuscript is fluently written and well formulated and presents methodical empirically proven findings on a up-to-date level with very high scientific value to the ongoing improvements in Biomass modelling and calculation of AGB of single trees based on dense Lidar point clouds.

Your experiment and the analysis are well designed and correctly described and you produce reproducible findings, which are worth to publish in the journal considered. This paper presents novel methodical approaches, most recent technical and methodical improvements, continuous evolution of innovative methods described, and published in earlier paper in the last 14 month.

I invite the authors read in and addressing some minor revisions and some suggestions to improve their manuscript suggested by the reviewer. AS the only major revision and remark, I recommended applying trapezoid or conical cylinder models, when modelling the segmented tree trunk due to the taper of the tree trunk. Please acknowledge this in your paper and revise it in your paper accordingly. This will improve your AGB biomass calculation even more. Thank you.

Other minor remarks, recommendations or suggestions to improve your manuscript are given in the revised pdf version attached to my review. Please consider my comments and text recommendations. Thank you .

In a final linguistic check, you may consider reducing the use of passive voice in your manuscript.

I wish you much success with the final steps in improving your manuscript getting it ready for a publication soon.  All the best and good luck, take care.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language Your manuscript is fluently written and well formulated and in a final linguistic check, you may consider reducing the use of passive voice in your manuscript.

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our manuscript. We note from your feedback that you reviewed the paper very carefully line by line. We appreciate the great effort you put into this task. We feel extremely fortunate that our paper has received such attention from you. In fact, such high-quality reviewing reflects the outstanding quality of the Remote Sensing journal. This is why we thank the journal editor for the careful selection of the referee team. At this stage, we would like to confirm that the paper has been carefully revised and edited by considering all your comments. All major corrections are now highlighted in yellow. We hope that the revised version meets the required standard and be considered for publication in this journal.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In my opinion, the division of the manuscript should be simplified. To designate: Introduction, Methodology and material, Results and discussion, Conclusions (there can be many subsections in each stage but such an arrangement in my opinion will simplify the reception of the work). I suggest the authors review the cited equations because most of them are not discussed in the paper. The Introduction chapter lacks information on the methods used to determine stem volume (commonly used in the forestry and timber industry, e.g., volume tables) and determine crown volume. There is a lack of information on what advantages and disadvantages these methods have. I would add point 2 to the introduction. The current division of the article makes it difficult to compare the authors' results and conclusions with literature data. Hence my comment about the need to restructure the article's division. In the conclusions, you should not describe how the method used by the authors works, but what the authors concluded from their research. Whether the method is better/worse than those currently used. Does it give a more accurate measurement/is it faster/slower. Does it provide a viable result/ distort the result, etc. 

The number of authors' auto citations is debatable (in the case of one author amounting to more than 13% of the total literature).

Please respond to the comments because the work, besides being difficult to digest, is interesting and valuable. 

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our manuscript. We note from your feedback that you reviewed the paper very carefully line by line. We appreciate the great effort you put into this task. We feel extremely fortunate that our paper has received such attention from you. In fact, such high-quality reviewing reflects the outstanding quality of the Remote Sensing journal. This is why we thank the journal editor for the careful selection of the referee team. At this stage, we would like to confirm that the paper has been carefully revised and edited by considering all your comments. All major corrections are now highlighted in yellow. We hope that the revised version meets the required standard and be considered for publication in this journal.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1- Provide absolute quantitative results in addition to relative results in the Abstract section.

2- What does it add to the subject area compared with other published material in addition to more accurate results?

3- What parts do you consider original or relevant for the field? What specific gap in the field does the paper address?

4- How did you set the parameters in your methodology? What is the range of values and Steps? 

5- Provide more comprehensive literature review? Is LIDAT the only technology used for Calculation of Biomass Volume?

6- What is the future direction of this paper?

7- The quality of subfigure number needs revision. The quality of figures do not match the requirements of this journal.

8- Add legend for the figures if necessary (e.g., Figure. 6).

9- Add quantitative results to Conclusion section.

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our manuscript. We note from your feedback that you reviewed the paper very carefully line by line. We appreciate the great effort you put into this task. We feel extremely fortunate that our paper has received such attention from you. In fact, such high-quality reviewing reflects the outstanding quality of the Remote Sensing journal. This is why we thank the journal editor for the careful selection of the referee team. At this stage, we would like to confirm that the paper has been carefully revised and edited by considering all your comments. All major corrections are now highlighted in yellow. We hope that the revised version meets the required standard and be considered for publication in this journal.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

I thank the authors for addressing my comments on their work. I still believe that combining some of the chapters would have been beneficial to the work presented but I understand and respect the authors' point. I apologize very much for the correction but equations that are well known and understood in a certain field may be unknown or negligible in other fields and the paper should have the widest possible and understandable reception hence some of my comments. 

In the conclusion, lines 649-654 do not introduce the conclusion and could just as well have been in the introduction.  Verses 656-660 should be in the methodology and not in the conclusions. All the referenced verses I propose to remove from the conclusions because they are not.

I propose to accept the work for publication after minor corrections. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our manuscript. We note from your feedback that you reviewed the paper very carefully line by line. We appreciate the great effort you put into this task. We feel extremely fortunate that our paper has received such attention from you. We would like to confirm that the paper has been carefully revised and edited by considering all your comments. All major corrections are now highlighted in yellow. We hope that the revised version meets the required standard and be considered for publication in this journal.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper can be published in the present form.

Author Response

Thank you very much for spending your time and efforts for reviewing our manuscript. We appreciate all your observations and comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf