Response of Forest Plant Diversity to Drought: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Paper is well-written. However, some deficiencies have been reported which must be addressees before publication.

1. words used in the title canot be repeated in the keywords. 

2. There is no table in the manuscript.

3. Figure is very poor graphic and cannot evaluated. even too much difficult to read. only one figure is not sufficient for the paper. Add atleast two tables and figures in the manuscrpt.

4. Re-write those sentences which started with the citation. Try to avoid to start paragraph with the citation. 

5. Dought defination should not be subheading. Be ellaboate and modify the heading of drought defination.

6. Future directons are very poor. this section is poorly treated by authors.

7. Figures canot be cited in the conclusion.

 

Improvments are required.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Review of water-2624210: Zhang et al.: Response of forest biodiversity to drought: a review

The paper addresses an important issue, even more since the majority of existing papers dealing with the issue rather focus on how biodiversity in forests affects their response (in terms of resistance, biomass acquisition, carbon capture) to drought. The impacts of drought on biodiversity, however, is a complex issue and this paper does not add much to enlighten it. Major comments below, many comments, from minor to major, are directly in the PDF.

1.       Too many unclear expressions leave the reader wonder: what does it mean? Many examples are highlighted in the PDF

2.       The paper mainly addresses tree species diversity, but states that it aims to address forest biodiversity in general. This needs to be clarified.

3.       “Forest” can have very different meanings, from natural systems (which vary a lot – also with regard to their “basic” biodiversity - depending on vegetation-zone) to quite artificial plantations. Any biodiversity response to drought will certainly (also) depend on the initial situation. With your broad approach, it is inevitable that the main conclusion comes down as written in line 407: the response is unpredictable. So you should confine your review to one or a small and clearly defined set of systems to be considered.

4.       Limitations of field surveys are highlighted, but I miss a thorough discussion of limitations of remote sensing technology with regard to biodiversity.

T.       Table 1 is incomplete in addressing only the individual/species level.

5.       Figure 1 is misleading and incomplete. When talking about biodiversity, you have to address levels beyond individuals and single species!

6.       The conclusions are so general (no wonder with your broad approach, see point 3) that they are not helpful at all.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Language is generally OK, but the authors tend to use expression which are overly complicated and partly unclear as marked in the PDF

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for submitting valuable manuscript to Water journal.

Please check below minor revisions.

The title of this section is "Methods to Estimate and Measure," but before the 2.2.1 section, it just described the meaning of "Biodiversity." Please provide a straightforward exploration of why the author divided the 2.2.1 Subsubsection and 2.2.2 Remote Sensing Data.

 

We acknowledge that the title "Subsubsection" may be unclear. The contents of the 2.2.1 section describe the "inventory" of the forest-related dataset. We recognize that this term may not be the most suitable choice and will either provide a more descriptive title or clarify its purpose within the manuscript. Please provide a more descriptive title or explain its purpose within the manuscript.

 

This reviewer also suggests adding the monitoring part in the 2.2 section. There are many different methods to estimate and measure the forest biodiversity. However, monitoring data or activity is important to estimate and measure biodiversity. I know that the "inventory" contains the monitoring data (i.e., Chirici et al., 2012), but there are still many monitoring activities for evaluating the forest biodiversity (i.e., Mi et al., 2016). 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has been significantly improved, but some issues remain, see comments in PDF. In particular, it seems in my earlier review I was not clear enough with regard to the differentiation between specific forest ecosystems in future studies. While no clear response of biodiversity could be found when looking at forests in general, this might be different when focusing on specific systems. One example is the study by Gutierrez et al. https://rdcu.be/dmVU8, a study which should be considered in the review (I have no relation at all to the authors).

In their response to the earlier review, the authors acknowledged one limitation: not distinguishing between natural and managed systems. They should address this issue also in the paper and in particular in conclusions.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

some unclear expressions are highlighted in the PDF

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf