Testing White’s Floristic Impoverishment Hypothesis in the Forest-Savanna Transition Zones of Africa

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. General Comments

The paper presented has a very detailed analysis about the subject. It presents a great number of bibliographic references and a deep discussion. It is very pleasant to read and easy to understand. Provides an important reflexion and gives reliable information about forests and savannas in sub-Saharan Africa emphasising the relevance of these of biomes in Ecosystems Services. Very interesting.

 2. Section by section

2.1. Introduction:

Introduction is very comprehensible. Provides a lot of references to consolidate all the affirmations made.

 2.2. Material and Methods:

Material and Methods are very clear and allow to understand the main objective of the present study. The methodology proposed allows the reader to understand the work done and to replicate the experiment. The statistical methods used are adequate and support the conclusions made.

 2.3. Results and Discussion:

Results are well presented and discussed. The authors have obtained a considerable number of data and explain them carefully with a good support in bibliography. The great number of works consulted and cited enrich the present paper and makes it also an important review about African biomes.

 2.4 Discussion

The paper points out, very clearly, the relevance of the study and the necessity to continue the investigation on this theme. 

 3. Other comments

I appreciated the article; it was very pleasant to read. It is a source of reliable information highlighting the relevance of forests and savannas transition zones of Africa.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for their encouraging comments and we are pleased to contribute to this body of literature.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

See review, delete word "significant"

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

 The article presents valuable insights into the species composition and evolutionary diversity in transition zones between forests and savannas. I found this paper original, well-written, well-structured, and highly interesting for publication in Diversity.

 The introduction provides a clear background and context for the study, highlighting the importance of the present research. However, I believe that some topics could be better explained. Forests, savannas, and transition zones should be defined, and it would be beneficial to include a brief explanation of the ecological and environmental factors that contribute to the formation of transition zones. Among these factors, fire plays a crucial role in maintaining savannas by keeping tree cover low. I suggest enriching the introduction with more references on this topic, such as the articles by Beckett et al. (2022) (https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2745.13851) and Oliveras and Malhi (2016) (http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0308).

 The methods section adequately describes the data collection and analysis procedures. However, the scale of 1° grids cells (more than 100 x 100 km) seems inadequate for analyzing a transition that can occur within a much smaller extent. It would be helpful to provide more information regarding the rationale behind selecting this scale.

 The results section effectively presents interesting findings, including species richness and measures of evolutionary diversity. The figures are well-constructed and are necessary to evidence the points made in the text. In Figure 3, it is important to include a color legend within the map area.

  The discussion section provides a comprehensive interpretation of the results. To strengthen the discussion, it would be beneficial to explore the potential ecological mechanisms that may contribute to the observed patterns. Additionally, including a brief discussion on the implications of the study's findings for conservation efforts and land management in transition zones would be interesting.

 Overall, this is a very good paper and I recommend publication after minor revision. I hope the suggested comments can help to improve the clarity and rigor of this very interesting study.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

I really like the purpose of this study; this is a valuable paper that put in light the characteristic of woody diversity in the forest-savanna transition zone in Africa, analysing different aspect of diversity that related to richness to those relative to phylogenetic aspects. I have only two minor suggestions: specify in the title that the paper is relative to woody species and change the title of 2.3 the grid cells are not sampling units.  

Author Response

Response: We thank the reviewer for their encouraging comments. We have amended the title of section 2.3 to be “Floristic assemblages”. Concerning the title of the paper, we believe that it accurately reflects the questions at hand. We explicitly mention that we focus our attention on woody species throughout the manuscript, including in the abstract. We also could not find a way to elegantly include ‘woody’ in the title. Thus, we would like to keep the title of the paper, however we have included the term “woody” to our key words list.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

My comments and suggestions were adequately addressed.

Some choppy prose in the new material, could be smoothed.