The Application of Fire Behavior Modeling to Fuel Treatment Assessments at Army Garrison Camp Williams, Utah

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper described the application of fire behavior modeling to fuel treatment assessments for implementation of fire and fuel breaks with the goal of reducing fire at the Army Garrison Camp Williams, Utah. The authors present an approach to assessing the likelihood of a fire breaching fire and fuel breaks in different fuel types and under a variety of environmental conditions and slope. The authors thoroughly describe the fire behavior models used including their assumptions, limitations, and uncertainties. The paper is very timely given large efforts to implement fuel breaks throughout the Great Basin USA given the increase in fire activity observed over the last two decades. I recommend minor revisions.  

Abstract:  
Line 17: Replace sage-steppe with sagebrush steppe 
Line 21: Add some language to explain what you mean by primary and secondary fuel breaks.  
Introduction 
Line 56: fuel medication? 
Line 188: why the word “after” in the parenthesis? 
Line 222: Sanberg bluegrass should be Sandberg bluegrass 
Line 306-320 appears to be part of the Author Guidelines and should be removed.  
Line 363-367: The use of NEXUS is unclear. Was NEXUS used in combination with BehavePlus? NEXUS is used for assessing crown fire hazard, but most of your fuel types did not have trees. Some additional explanation is needed.  
Line432-434: What kind of imagery was used for the fuel model classification? I also recommend including a sentence about what variables were used in the random forest classification. Was it reflectance values from the imagery only or also other environmental data such as elevation, slope, aspect etc.  
 Line 464: I assume you mean “with trees and/or shrubs present” (shrubs is missing) 
Figure 9 – great maps 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments:

The authors have written an article entitled ‘The Application of Fire Behavior Modeling to Fuel Treatment Assessments at Army Garrison Camp Williams, Utah’ where  authors have tried to compile the relevant information in this article, and however, still this article is NOT well-organized article and eventually it suffers from significant drawbacks and some of them are listed as listed below:

1. Usually, the abstract of a reader-friendly, scientific review article is the ‘self-dependent and concise summary’ of the whole investigation; this is a MANDATORY criterion of writing an article. Unfortunately, the current version of the abstract does not satisfy the criterion, as stated above. So, a reader-friendly abstract must include the following events systematically for example ‘(i) problem definition, (ii) solution methodologies, and (iii) the key findings of the investigation along with the future directions of this work, etc. Unfortunately, all of these events as mentioned above are missing in this article. This is one of the major shortcomings of this article. Moreover, some unnecessary words/phrases/sentences have been included in the abstract, which are suitable elsewhere but not in the abstract.

 

2. The next important and most vital part of an article is the ‘introduction’. It is generally treated as the heart of an article. The introduction part usually guides the flow of the rest of the article’s parts. So, a question naturally arises on how to construct the introduction? It is a significant event for a good and well-organized scientific article. To address the above question, it is required to survey the existing literature on the subject matter of the article extensively, and this kind of literature survey will help authors to reveal the ‘research gap or originality’ within the existing literature. Once the ‘research gap’ is identified, then the rest of the article MUST be devoted to filling up the ‘research gap’ as identified. Unfortunately, the ‘introduction’ of this article has not written as highlighted above. In other words, the authors have completely failed to reveal the ‘research gap’ in this investigation. Without revealing the ‘research gap’ systematically, any kind of research has no scientific value in reality! This is another severe shortcoming of this article!

 

3. Another important event is that when we are writing any research article regardless of the types (i.e., review, or regular article, short communication, etc.); we have to keep in mind that our article will read our potential readers after the publication. Consequently, we have to care about potential readers' feelings, about whether they will feel comfortable or not. This is an obligatory event for writing any reader-friendly good article. I am pretty sure that the potential reader will not feel comfortable while reading this article due to the absence of systematic ORDER for the constructions of the whole story in filling the ‘research gap’ as identified earlier. This is another drawback of this article.

 

4. The conclusion part MUST also be precise and straightforward as an abstract so that the potential readers can easily understand the events as mentioned above (1) along with major observations of the article which is valid under certain range of pertinent parameters. Again, the ‘conclusion’ part is not written as expected. Besides, the ‘conclusion’ must have consistency with the abstract; this is a common practice of writing a reader-friendly scientific article. Moreover, what kinds of topics that are relevant with the subject matter of this article have not been addressed yet, which is required to be listed precisely at the last paragraph of conclusion; this is an obligatory event for this article. Hence, a major revision is necessary as suggested above.    

 

5. This article has much more anomalies, and it is the authors’ responsibility to figure out all of them and address them accordingly.

 

6. The quality of Figs is NOT good and hence  extensive modification is necessary.

 

7. After implementing the above comments, then the reviewer would like to see their revised results and discussion as appropriate.

 

8. Anyway, please wait for the comments from the editorial office.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

1. The author's research on preventing the spread of wildfire is interesting, and there are quite a lot of reliable data as support. Generally speaking, this is a good article.

 

2. You'd better reduce the length of the article. At present, the content of the article is too much, which makes readers feel a little tired when reading this document.

 

3. For the simulation work, especially in the case of large-scale, how to modify the fire behavior to make the simulation results more in line with the actual situation and ensure the accuracy of the simulation, which needs to be described in more detail in this paper

 

4. In the conclusion part, most of the sentences are quoted from other literature. Please add more summary contents derived from your own research

Author Response

Please see attachment. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

This is an interesting and important study and is well written. I only have a couple of comments/suggestions:

I believe lines 306 – 320 are part of the submission template and should be deleted.

I assume in figure 1 that fire spread is upslope? Maybe this could be made clearer.

In line 386, why was a cumulative frequency distribution used? Was it because it is assumed that the effects of weather one day is somewhat dependent on weather in previous days? Maybe it should be better explained why CFD was used.

 

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

 

Please wait for the comments from the editorial office