Agriculturally Improved and Semi-Natural Permanent Grasslands Provide Complementary Ecosystem Services in Swedish Boreal Landscapes

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Comments to the paper manuscript, entitled “Agriculturally improved and semi-natural permanent grasslands provide complementary ecosystem services in Swedish  boreal landscapes“.

 

 

The study is focused on monitoring of area of temporary grasslands improved permanent grasslands and semi-natural permanent grasslands in Sweden. Moreover, the study brings new view on evaluation of grassland ecosystem services, particularly ESS of temporary grasslands on arable land. The manuscript points to the special importance of each type of grassland and the complementarity of grass ecosystems in the landscape.

 

I recommend publishing the manuscript in present form.

Author Response

Thank you for the positive review of our work.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

In my opinion the paper is interesting, though the introduction is far too long and the conclusions too short. Ca 50% of the paper is very descriptive and it is not supported by good quality photographs, and aerial images in this case, that can give the reader a better view of the landscape that has been investigated. All together I think that many things should be revised before being accepted for publication

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you for your suggestions. We reduced the original introduction from 1100 words to 700 words. We believe that the description of how Swedish grasslands are organised administratively is necessary for understanding our system, but this does this add paragraphs to the intro and potentially make the text longer. Therefore we have retained description of Swedish grasslands but, we hope, still captured the key information in the reduced text. After reducing we did however need to add a new paragraph about the importance of the study in response to other reviewer comments.

We agree that some visual aids, such as a photo, would greatly improve understanding. We hope the new drone image (new Figure 1) provides broad contextual understanding of the two main PG types we are interested in. Furthermore, we have added a list of vascular plant species observed in the different grassland types (ordered by occurrence in sample sites) to supplementary materials. The conclusions have now been expanded. 

 

With regards to the study being descriptive. We hope the reduction in introduction text reduces this problem. Analytically, we do not believe the study is overly descriptive. We have addressed our questions with the help of (i) the R survey package that incorporates complex designs into area estimates, (2) nested mixed models to investigate ecosystem service indicators in different grassland types, which we present with figures showing modelled estimates and (3) we use species accumulation curves with modelled confidence intervals to get a good sense of the total species richness in the different grassland types in relation to sample effort. We think a valuable future step would be to more specifically model species and vegetation patterns across grassland types, but this falls outside of the scope of this study.  

Intext comments

We found 6 in-text comments that we address in order. 

(1) See reply above about introduction text length,

(2) Comment about methods being also descriptive of the methods used: No change.

(3) Thank you for this comment. We agree that the analysis results as presented offered little context for our system. We hope the new figure 1 and supplementary material with species lists for the different grassland types gives some more context about our system for the interested reader.-  

(4) Request for reference. We currently cite two papers that generically look at ecosystem services and roles for biodiversity for grasslands in our region. One challenge is to find papers that explicitly look at improved permanent grassland in our region (separated from temporary grassland). If there is literature that we have missed we would be happy to receive a suggestion and we will add. No change at present.

(5) The section based on Lindborg et al. is used to put our findings into a landscape agricultural context (which we think is a very important contextual discussion). However, Lindborg et al don’t clearly distinguish between improved PG and improved TG as we state, so this discussion is about as far as we can go for now.

(6) We have re-written the conclusions. Thank you for pointing out the need for improvement. 

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript by Guillermo Aguilera Nuñez, Anders Glimskär, Giulia Zacchello, Richard M Francksen, Mark J Whittingham, Matthew Hiron presents a new study which examines the Agriculturally improved and semi-natural permanent grasslands provide complementary ecosystem services in Swedish boreal landscapes. The manuscript fit well with the standards of Agronomy. The text is well organized, easy to read.

 

Comments:

Introduction. A lot of literature sources was discussed in the article, but the scientific exploration of the theme is poor, it not become clearer why this study should be carried out. Why does this study matter? What question is it really answering? The text contains a lot of statements which are very general.

Materials and Methods. The approach seems correct and the methodology used is adequate.

Results. In the results, the relevant research progress of this topic is too simple. Which are the main phytocoenoses/plant Associations? Describe the aboveground vegetation. Theoretically, the natural grasslands should have more plant species/higher plants species diversity than the others. I suggest a brief description.  I suggest expanding this section and discussing results based on data of figures. In the results (or in a supplementary file) is not indicated the list of plant taxa identified. Figures are of good quality.

Discussion should be improved and developed (too much data of your research and too little analysis of the data of other authors).

Conclusion lacks a final informative message for readers. I suggest rewriting conclusion in order to present more clearly and in detail.

 

The English is clear and does not have any major spelling errors. But I'm not a native speaker.

 On my opinion this article deserves to be published after minor revision.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. We have now added an additional paragraph about why the study is important to the introduction and edits to the conclusions to explicitly outline why our results are important. We broadened the conclusions as suggested and now the value of the study is brought into sharper focus. We have included a link between our findings and the economic aspects of grassland AES in Sweden which further highlights the importance of the work.

Regarding having general statements in the manuscript,: we agree with this statement but believe this generality in our approach reflects the fact that we are dealing with patterns covering a large spatial scale and a broad treatment of grassland types. There is also currently little literature available which prevents us to fully theorise our research questions about the different types of PG we cover. We do think, as the reviewer alluded to, that more detailed and specific studies dealing with vegetation patterns and species occurrence would be a valuable next step but they are not part of the current study.

 

Results. Whilst we agree the analyses are simple in what they convey,  the paper is a unique treatment of independent large-scale monitoring data in our region (over 1600 field sample sites and over 380 3 km x 3 km landscape squares) ,which is rare especially for independently investigating the efficacy of large-scale land management (e.g. AES). We intended to focus on the clear message of contrasting a limited number of examples of ecosystem service indicators. These indicators, were chosen to highlight different values that can be linked to grasslands and represented by our data without too many assumptions or detailed species/community/biodiversity analyses. We agree with the reviewer that more in-depth community vegetation analysis (and discussion of results in this area) would be interesting and a natural next step for delving deeper into the ecological values of these grasslands types. However, such work is beyond the remit of the current paper.  

We agree that there should be a species list provided in order to add vegetation/ecological context to our results. Thank you for this suggestion, we have added a list of vascular plant species observed in the different grassland types (ordered by occurrence in sample sites) to supplementary materials.

Discussion and conclusions

 In response to the comments of the reviewer we have developed the conclusion, specifically to: (i) highlight how grassland AES systems work in Sweden; (ii) show that some grasslands that are eligible for grassland AES may have comparable ecological function to grasslands that are not eligible for grassland AES. This addition aligns our study more clearly with policy and grassland management. It also points to the remaining knowledge gap that requires more detailed ecological studies to fully understand the field-level details of the system.  

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

 

Your manuscript is a well-considered contribution to the fields of agronomy and vegetation science. Anyway, Figure 3 requires a minor correction. It contains four graphs, and some of the labels appear to be inaccurate.

Author Response

Thank you for your comments and for pointing the figure error out. Figure 3 (now fig 4) is fixed. We have also re-ordered the model output slightly so that TG is to the far left and all PG to the right  of the graphs.  

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for revising the menusvcript and adding the illustration that should be very important for the reader to have a better idea of the general situation