Combining Climate Change Mitigation Scenarios with Current Forest Owner Behavior: A Scenario Study from a Region in Southern Sweden

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

As I have said in the previous revision, this manuscript is a topical and innovative contribution to improve decision-making concerning the integration of climate change mitigation issues in forest management. This is a timely and well-written paper, and the authors did an excellent job. I recommend publication, but, before this, the authors could be interested in incorporating these minor issues:

• l. 279: define this minimum rotation age
• l.293: real interest rate?
• l. 395: … satisfied exactly this demand?
• Maybe the terms “advisors” and “informants” could be challenging to differentiate between them for the readers.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The statement below is based on the letter where authors inform how they have reacted to reviewers comments as well as the contents of the new version (tracked ms).

I thank authors for making substantial editing and changes to the ms. It has improved a lot and. However, it is still very difficult to read, and therefore, what has been done and how is very hard to understand.

Most importantly, I still think chapter 2 needs a lot of work. Introduction is quite good,result section needs some minor improvements and discussion section could be sharpened a bit too.

For chapter two, I recommend authors could consider the feasibility of the following suggestions:

• Most importantly, I recommend to rewrite chapter 2.3 totally. it is very challenging nin current format. Consifder also using sub-chapters under 2.3?
• First, the introductory text could start from genral (In Sweden...), then it could go to practical arrangements. Second, I would present first the climate change scenarios, then the management  strategies and then very shortly the management practices. 
• Consider how table 1  could be improved: perhaps change the positions of column 2 and 3. Some information could be added to target porportion column to increase information value of the table , bearing in mind the international readers. Consider also if the table fits better to supplementatry material.  
• Sentence starting from line 593: "This process involved..." can be deleted. If you tell what kind of management is applied, then you do not need to tell what is not applied.
• Line 817: if the sized of holding affected the allocation of strategy, then the process was not random? Small clarification could be added.
• line 294: the sentence stops to abbreviation i.e. - somethingi is missing.
• in Chapter two, there is still information regarding price behavior elsewhere than in chapter 2.4. In line 391 it is said "THe forest owner had myopic price expectations", in bit odd location and without any further explanations?
• Figure 2 caption says that Fig 2C shows species distribution, but in ms. this figure does not exist?
• Table 5: u.b. = under bark
• Figure 5 and perhaps elsewhere: consider adding horizontal line to level 1 to improve readability?

Discussion

• The strategies were frozen. In the related discussion, the authors could clearly state that the strategies in private holdings are changes continuously, due to changes in ownerships of these holdings, taking place in 20-year intervals. In addition, there exists clear results also from Sweden (e.g. Lönnqvist) that owners in different phases of their ownership have different strategies. This is a clearly an aspect that should be discussed when the viability of the study approach is evaluated.
• Secondly, the study considers part of the Kronoberg as a closed system, which needs to fulfil the globally derived demand. Maybe you could reflect also this and how timber markets are behaving? Harvesting the last available potential will also be more costly in practice.
• These two aspects belong clearly more to sub-chapter “Uncertainties and improvements”. In this sub-chaper, quite a lot of space is given to GLOBIOM and climate change mitigations scenarios. In my opinion, the focus could be more on the management side elements and related uncertainties.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

In my opinion, the ms has again improved considerably. The authors have responded to comments, made suggested changes carefully, and also justified well if not.

Author Response

We are glad that Reviewer 2 find our comments and changes satisfactory. 

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript is a topical and innovative contribution to improve decision-making concerning the integration of climate change mitigation issues in forest management. The method is very solid, the study region is prominent, and the active involvement of forest consultants and other stakeholders is innovative. The contribution is an excellent example of a multi-perspective assessment of future wood demand, and this type of study has frequently been demanded, for instance, by EU-LULUCF regulations. However, some minor issues could be considered to improve the already strong manuscript:

• Title: maybe too long (The potential to meet future timber demands under different climate change mitigation scenarios integrating forest owners’ preferences...)
• What exactly means “schoolbook” in a forest management context?
• Figure 1. Does wrt mean “with respect to”?
• Table 1: the same percentage appears with total retention and set-asides (8%). An explanation regarding these areas (are the same?) could be provided as in l. 253 retention is 6%
• l. 235: delete “rotational” or explain why this word has been included
• Table 2: are retention alternatives only considered with “no management” measures?
• Figure 5: I think it could be deleted
• l. 376: Is it realistic assuming the invariability of owners’ preferences along the planning horizon?
• Figure 14: maybe it could be useful for the reader to point the current utilization intensity in the Region (0,79?)

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewer statement on forests-627669

After reading the ms carefully, I find it interesting and potentially suitable for publishing in Forests journal. The study certainly provide’s important information, but its value will increase considerably if the authors improve it considerably. The main reasons for the above recommendation are as follows:

The ms is difficult to read due to its length and structure. It includes a lot of explanation on how certain things have been implemented in the study, but a holistic picture on how the calculations have been made is missing. To alleviate this problem, I recommend that the authors add a figure that shows how different parts of the study are connected and interact with each other. In addition, the ms is missing crucial information needed to understand the phases of the study. For example, how the prices for 5-year periods are developing and how they were derived and how they actually affect the decision making of forest owners (if not at all) is missing. Most importantly, I was not able to find any information on how saw-log and pulpwood demand and prices are dealt with. In scenarios, the demand for different assortments (including bioenergy) is most certainly developing differently, but this aspect has been totally neglected. On the contrary, the ms includes a lot of text that is not so relevant. For example, the stand delineation procedures and stand data etc. are explained and evaluated in great detail. However, this is, at least for me, less important, as the study mainly compares different scenarios that use the same initial data. Please reconsider what is essential and what is not and in this way reduce the lengt of the ms.

Detailed comments:

In line 124, it is said that the analytical tool determined which kind of ecosystem services were supplied – however, this study only considered timber harvesting explicitly It seems that the initial forest characteristics affect the results of lot (for example recent storms) – why you selected this area for your study? It is not told anywhere, how the ten areas from the county were selected In Fig 4c, there is also great deviation in site index class 30 – why Please explain also what the Brownian price behavior actually means, add reference too. Please collect all timber price related information to same location in the text. From Figure 6 onwards, the titles above the figures should be removed – the figure captions should tell all necessary information. Line 386: less than the largest of 50 ha or and 50% of the area of the property – unclear to me at least How the model allocates the penalty and pine regeneration to holdings is also unclear to me – i.e. in which holdings the demand is forced to exceed the supply of the owner based on the management strategy. Figure 7 probably has wrong unit in y-axis In table 3, it is not easy to understand the meaning of “10 yrs.1/20yrs.2 past” and similar notifications elsewhere in the table. Do you truly believe that the AVERAGE standing timber volumes in the planning area can reached – this aspect is not dealt with in discussion.

Finally, the ms includes numerous typos (e.g. lines 89, 149,340, 384, 409 etc. ), poorly structured and/or unnecessary long sentences (e.g. lines 62, 256,360) as well as not so coherent use of terminology (management specifications/strategies vs management programs vs. management practices; analytical tool vs. the forest owner decision model). I recommend careful final edits and proofreading for the ms.