Water Availability Controls the Biomass Increment of Melia dubia in South India

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Forests manuscript - -

General comments:

In general, this manuscript has a valuable topic. The manuscript is written. The English language and style are fine except for moderate English language check required. The experimental design is adequate. There are some minor comments.

Detailed comments:

In general, Please avoid using personal pronouns such as line 423: our results, Line434: we conclude and apply this rule throughout the manuscript

Abstract:

The aim of the study and the main objectives not clearly stated.

Please include some more values that refer to the most significant results of this study.

Introduction:

This section needs to be enriched and provided with more background about the topic.

Materials and Methods:

The experimental design is adequate and suitable to the current study.

Results:

The results well presented

Although the results provided in this manuscript were considered little, they are very significant and enough to make a good publication after some minor revision.

Discussion:

This section needs some more work

Most of this section is too long paragraphs and difficult to understand. For example, Line 357-395 is very confusing. Please rewrite this part.

Conclusion:

This section is too short.

Please provide a good and a proper conclusion for the study and include the significant findings.

References:

The authors provided enough citations, and it was UpToDate. BUT there are too many citations. For example, Line 65 Australia and Ghana (26, 28-31), the author used 5 citations for a small piece of information. Please take off the unnecessary citations and apply this rule throughout the manuscript.

*I am convinced that this manuscript is very valuable and will be suitable to be published in Forests journal after minor revision

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The scope of the paper, as stated by the authors from the very beginning, is to identify the main factors controlling aboveground biomass of a native leaf-deciduous tree species Melia dubia for short-rotation plantations. In general, the analyses are reasonable and the workload is sufficient. However, the authors didn’t review the related researches in Introduction, and also didn’t present the knowledge gap and their scientific question. Even though such research is of a high importance, I am not sure what's new in this manuscript, and hence I cannot really asses it's value. If the author’s key contribution is evaluating the impact of the interaction between natural and artificial water supply on AGB as they presented in line 374-376, I suggest the authors to highlight this conclusion to reflect the significance of this paper.

Minor comment:

Fig.2: The current version fails to show the distribution of those characteristics clearly. I think histogram or kernel density could show the distribution better and is easier to understand for audiences.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I am satisfied with the revised version of the manuscript. I feel it was well managed and edited at its current stage, so I suggest acceptance for publication.