Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

File attached with minor comments

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1. The last sentence of the abstract is awkward and should be revised.
2. Line 151: details about the manufacturer of the (Hobo Pendant) are missing. Model no, manufacturer, city, country etc.
3. Line 155-156: references or details are missing for the determinations of the listed factors.
4. It is recommended that a statistical analyses section will be added at the end of the M&M section, and the statistical analyses will be described there rather than within the data analyses section. Alternatively, the authors can change the name of the data analyses section to mention also statistical analyses.
5. Line 233, and throughout the text p should be in Italics (F > 3.26; p < 0.007).
6. Line 243: m2 should be m².
7. Figure 2: Add units to the title of the y axes where appropriate for example: Cover (%). Also, spell the words in full, not abbreviations, in the title of the Y axes when possible.
8. Figure 2: in the legends write the number of replicates. For example, (n=3)
9. Table 4: where appropriate add the units in parentheses to the column heading. For example: Specificity (%).
10. Figure 4: a title is missing for the x axis.
11. Line 557: remove: "Supplementary Materials: Not applicable".
12. Line 548: ".. proposing more influencing factors than warming" should be changed to.." "..suggesting that factors other than warming influence.."

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

I highly appreciate the value of long-term data. I also understand that, if you are in the process of producing such a long-term data set, you have to start somewhere. And you don’t want to wait 20 years before you produce your first publication. All accepted. But the problem with this work is that besides a general comment on “global change” and “there are few data from the southern hemisphere”, there is hardly any scientific framework that goes beyond a “let´s have a look”. That is a bit thin for a publication in an international journal. I do expect specific hypotheses on what you would expect. What is new?

I would also tone down the conclusions. You sampled a total of c. 100 m2 on 7 mountain tops. Considering that vegetation is not an evenly distributed assemblage of individual species, all your conclusions on “specificity” and site differences are subject to considerable doubt with such a small sample size.  You state yourself l. 406: “ plant communities in mountains are locally more heterogeneous and patchier than in lowlands.”

So what can we learn from your data? Almost all your conclusions refer to fundamental knowledge on montane vegetation, it is all confirmatory. You frame your work in very general terms in a global change context. However, if you want to use this set up to document elevational shift s in the future as indicated in the introduction, to document just a small sample over a few m distance on the very top of each mountain is an odd approach. Should you not document vegetation changes with elevational relevés now and in years to come? How could you separate uphill movements from other forms of dynamics?

The lack of hypotheses becomes particularly apparent in the statistical treatment. Everything is tested in all directions. Good stats should start with clear hypotheses, such data mining approaches will easily "find" purely stochastic differences.

Having said all this, any properly collected data set has some value, and so I do not generally reject the possibility that this paper can be published after proper revision. For this reason I made an effort to edit the ms and attach an annotated version of their manuscript.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The revised version is much improved, although I am still not entirely convinced of the basic story line – it is clear that the hypotheses were made up post hoc and were not, as they should be, formulated before the study was started. For example, a hypothesis that elevational temperate changes may somehow differ in the southern hemisphere makes little sense to me – the relationship between atmospheric pressure and temperature is universal and variation has nothing to do with hemispheres, while of course local factors such as humidity do play a role, but independent of latitude and longitude ! So if you argue with variation, you could justify a study on any mountain range that has not been studied already.

Another general comment - With all the linguistic problems that can still be found in the revised version I can hardly believe that a native speaker has checked this paper! I have listed numerous cases, but the list is not complete - It should not be the job of a reviewer to do that

Title: I dont understand why you changed the title from “plant diversity...” to “plants...”. What would “variation in alpine plants” be? If you want to avoid “diversity”, you may use “plant assemblages”, but “variation in plants” makes no sense

l. 83 change: great influence ON past and present climate

l 84 r influence ON  high

l 85 has RARELY been scarcely explored

l 131/147  THE climate type

l 132 with A mean

l 149 temperatures

l 151 a winter cannot be “frozen”, you may use, e.g., “with long freezing spells”

l 155 growing in a scrubby life form, better “with a scrubby habit”

l 167 browseS

l 192 instead of “Eventually, some gaps in the register occurred by downloading fails, for …” write: There are some gaps in the dataset due to equipment failure. In such cases,  … “

l 198 It has been calculated --> it WAS calculated

l 215 “, which” is wrong. It is supposed to read “that” WITHOUT the comma, because the clause is a defining one.

L 217 testS

L 232 with A Monte Carlo

L 238 in should be “of”

L 278 AT both sites or ON both sites (change necessary numerous times, not only here)

L 289 ON each summit

L 293/305 ON both dates

L 434 a p value of 1 is as impossible as is a p value of 0. This is an artefact when a value of 0.9999… is rounded.

Table 5 bottom: “significance” should be “significance level”        (similar change in other cases also necessary)

L509 “the period 2015-2016 presented La Niña event” should be “a La Niña event occurred in the 2015-2016 period” . Using “to present” as it is used here works in Spanish, it does not in English (or is at least very unusual). Please reword all other usage of “present” as well.

L 534 why do you use altitude here and a few more times? Arguably, the correct term is elevation (which you do use otherwise)? See: McVicar, T.R., Körner, C., 2013. On the use of elevation, altitude, and height in the ecological and climatological literature. Oecologia 171, 335-337.

L 688 THE results

Line 712  influence the determination (the IN is wrong)

L 719 South PatagoniaN

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf