Assessing Wood Waste by Timber Industry as a Contributing Factor to Deforestation in Ghana

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Very poor Engilsh. Sometimes it´s hard to understand the meaning of the sentence or idea.

Some graphs are unnecessary, the description in text is sufficient (Fig. 3, 5, 8, 9, 11 and 12).

Fig 1: Poor quality of the figure, it´s hard to read the text in the figure

Chapter 3: What are the selected regions?

Line 187: In five selected regions and ten regions in Ghana - shouldn´t be ten "districts"?

Please explain what does it mean, that the companies "have idea of wood waste management".What was the question in the questionnaire? It will be appropriate to attach your questionnaire.

Line 258: What is it "trunck"?

Figures 8 and 9, both have the same title with "wood waste", but Fig. 9 describes "saw dust".

Line 279-280: Please describe "lack of resources"

This article can be used as a study (state of art) of wood processing in Ghana, but from my point of view, it isn´t a research article. I miss conclusions, evaluations or some recommendations.

Due to the number of other errors, the quality of English, I recommend a complete revision of the article, before publishing.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The "Assessing Wood Waste by Timber industry as acontributing factor to deforestation in Ghana "aims to evaluate how sawmills use wood waste. The text of the manuscript is not related to the title of the study, as it is not clear how wood waste can affect deforestation. In the text it is not clear either whether the cuts are legal or illegal and the reported data are old.

Introduction and Conclusions sections are poor and must be revised.

In my opinion, in the Introduction the state of the art is missing, as well as the novelty represented by this study. The conclusions do not summarize the outcomes but the methods. There is not a statistical analysis of data, the data were reported only in graph way.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

The study is aimed at assessing the knowledge of the Ghanaian forest industry on the integrated use of wood. The introduction and literature review provide an analysis of the state of Ghana's forest industry from 1990 to 2005.
The article does not provide an analysis of the activities of enterprises for the previous 15 years, which does not reflect the actual performance of enterprises. The conditions of the experiment (survey) are not fully described. For example. Employees of what profession answered questions? Why choose sawmills and carpentry companies? They harvest wood raw materials themselves? Why did you choose 50 companies? will they be enough to show the real picture in the country?
The questions presented in the introduction and conclusions on reforestation, impacts on soil and hydrological cycles, corruption, etc.are not studied in surveys and are not aimed at solving the research goals and objectives.
Most of the graphs and diagrams presented do not have any semantic meaning and duplicate the information provided in the text.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

No critical commnets.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The new version of the article clearly shows that updates and integrations have been usefully added to the References and to the Introduction and Conclusions sections, improving the level of information and the clarity of the manuscript.

However I have still the problem, as stated already in the first revision of the article, that study data are presented in simply descriptive mode, therefore providing an interesting picture of forest operations and wood processing in Ghana, also representative of forestry conditions in other African countries; however, there are no attempts to conduct statistical analysis, possibly with non-parametric tests for survey and qualitative data. These tests could greatly improve the article by providing additional perspective for a more meaningful interpretation of the collected data. Moreover, some images as Fig. 2, 5 and 6 could be even omitted and the information directly reported in the text. Finally, I suggest also some revisions of the text for the English language as apparently, way too many minor but annoying typographical mistakes, already present in the first version of the article, have not been corrected. As an example, just considering the way affiliations of the Authors are reported in the first page is not adequate with the standard accepted in the scientific literature.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Previous comments have not been significantly corrected. The article has a weak scientific significance.

Author Response

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