Temporal Stability of Grazed Grassland Ecosystems Alters Response to Climate Variability, While Resistance Stability Remains Unchanged
, Yantao Wu 1,†, Jiahe Cui 1, Hangyu Li 1, Hao Li 1, Jinghui Zhang 1, Bailing Miao 2, Lixin Wang 1, Zhiyong Li 1,* and Cunzhu Liang 1Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Overall, the manuscript is well written and of interest to many ecologists studying impacts of climate variability and grazing intensity.
Does the title reflect your results? Does climate variability impact resistance stability at all? If so, you might want to change the title. If not, I might use the word unchanged in the title rather than invariable.
Abstract: "impaired insurance effects" needs further explanation
Make sure all scientific names of plants are italicized. See line 295 and 296: Stipa grandis and Leymus chinensis.
On line 417 Capitalize Simultaneously as the word begins a new sentence.
Should the last paragraph on page 10 have a subheading of 5. Conclusions?
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The current study is just a replica of 'Grazing-induced biodiversity loss impairs grassland ecosystem stability at multiple scales' study with two climatic variables added. Neither the methods, data, or figures are new. Adding two more variables and publishing the same study doesn't add novelty to scientific research. Novelty in terms of ideas, data, methods, or analysis is required to publish in scientific journals. Based on my expertise, another study with the same data and methods that add two other variables and calls it a new or knowledge gap doesn't add anything.
Collecting field data is challenging and 7 years of grazing experiments is not easy. I appreciate the hard work of the original team that collected the data. The current study was very well written with good research questions and language. However, I cannot accept it as it is just a replica of the published study. I suggest authors develop a new conceptual design in the study using a different methodology or causal models, figures, and analysis and resubmit the manuscript.
All the very best!
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
The article titled "Temporal Stability of Grazed Grassland Ecosystems Alters in Response to Climate Variability, While Resistance Stability Remains Invariable", discusses grazing in semi-arid environments in Mongolia and its relationship to climate change.
The article is interesting to be published in Agronomy, but it needs to be improved.
The last part of introduction: We conducted.................., I think it should go to methodology.
Missing are the values of precipitation and temperature during the years of experimentation. Please add a table.
However, the experimental design of the plots is correct, however the authors in the description of the plots speak of the dominance of two species Stipa grandis and Leymus chinensis, both species are large, so they cannot be eaten by sheep. The high biomass generated by these species is the reason that the sheep can hardly eat them, which could affect the results. I recommend incorporating a table with all the species present in the plots with their relative abundance. This will serve to see how the dynamics of pastures has worked.
The results and discussion seem correct, but as I have mentioned, they could be altered by not having described the plots better initially.
In short, I believe that it is a meritorious work, but in my opinion it should be improved. As an example, the authors do not speak practically anything about the dynamics of pastures, it would be necessary to incorporate said dynamics for the three cases of grazing, low, moderate and intensive, since the authors only limit themselves to saying that with intensive grazing two opportunistic species enter.
Please incorporate the conclusions.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
I appreciate the authors for clarifying my concerns by highlighting the novelty and the scientific advancements compared to the previous study. The manuscript is well written with good quality figures and hence can be accepted for publication.
Reviewer 3 Report
I thank the authors for the corrections made.
