Physical and Biological Stream Health in an Agricultural Watershed after 30+ Years of Targeted Conservation Practices

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is a meaningful research, while the structure and writing of the MS are also good. Of course, there are still some limitations. Or rather, there have been some new findings in this work, but they have not been scientifically explained.

(1) Briefly supplementing the information of the research area in the abstract.

(2) “Lacking historical data on stream health prior to BMPs for comparison, our study simply assessed current instream and riparian habitats along with fish and aquatic macroinvertebrate communities.” Although the authors try to explain the impact of BMPs by combining some literature in the discussion section, a better approach is to conduct spatial analysis based on the locations and areas of BMPs.

(3) It can be understood that there are differences in ecosystem health at different scales, but it is still not possible to combine this differences with BMPs.

(4) Different types of BMPs correspond to different goals, which may lead to different results.

(5) “Second, stream site health differed slightly among major subwatersheds, but was not related to the number or areal coverage of implemented BMPs within a subwatershed.” This seems to lack sufficient evidences.

(6) “Finally, stream site health displayed similar geographic distribution (i.e., upstream to downstream) patterns within each subwatershed, with headwater sites of moderate quality, mid-reach sites of moderate to poor quality, and downstream sites with good quality.” Although the authors has provided some explanations based on literatures, the result of downstream health being the best is still worth further exploration.

 

In summary, although the research did not truly demonstrate the impact of BMPs on watersheds health under a large scale, it is generally worth publishing. So the above comments are only for the author's reference when making modifications.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

see the report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

This reviewer makes no suggestions for changes.