Urban Forest Ecosystem Services Vary with Land Use and Species: A Case Study of Kyoto City

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Ecosystem services in Urban areas are very important and your research is very interesting and needed.

I have some comments and suggestions for you:

• You mention benefit transfer method in introduction saying that it will be used in this study, but in the methodology there is no word on it. I think that is important to explain why you used the values from the mentioned studies of San Antonio River Basin of Texas and Nigeria and how are they similar to your research area, as it is important for this method. 
• Also when you compare cities it will be good to have at least some information on those cities which allowed comparison and supports your findings.
• It will be good to explain why there is no significant differences among quadrats' and it is on single-tree level. Are the quadrats size could be different or the selection of filed samples were influenced by something else.
• You deal with only few of ecosystem services which are important but for the urban dwelling there are not more important than cultural services, this should be mentioned.
• Conclusions are very short and there is no contribution to the management of urban green space which you mentioned in the abstract.
• And the references in text are missing in several parts, please revise the references.

I hope that you will find this comments and suggestions in place and that you will benefit from them.

Kind regards

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This study explores the ecosystem services using a ground-based sample quadrat in Kyoto City. The manuscript is not clear in many parts.

-Introduction: The originality and novelty of this study are not clear and not well elaborated. The research hypotheses and questions are also not discussed in detail.

-2.1. Study area: The authors need to provide a detailed description of the study area including land use structure and historical trends of land-use changes including urban development.

-Many references are missing (Error! Reference source not found.).

-Line 124: “The number of the quadrats accessed and investigated (n = 175)” why 175? Please provide justification and/or sensitivity analysis.

-Sections 2.3.1. to 2.3.5: The authors need to provide a detailed description of each variable including basic statistics, e.g., minimum, maximum, mean, etc.

-Section 2.4. Data analysis: This section is missing a description of the methods being used to analyze the data. I cannot judge this section and therefore the results and discussion sections.

-How did you evaluate the performance of your methods?

-How did you validate your results?  

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper deals with quite a practical topic of evaluation of urban forest ecosystem services. The study is useful, however it is not free from some shortcomings that need an attention from authors.

1. Keywords section must be extended. E.g., it would be nice to include a mention of “i-tree” software. This will help readers to find the article among a substantial bunch of similar studies (please see below).
2. Literature review is too focused and analyzes a narrow range of sources. My search with Scopus has given at least 323 documents with keyword “i-tree”, so there are a lot of applications of the main tool used in the paper. That needs to be carefully addressed.
3. Section 2.3. Would you please consider replacing “Calculation” with “Evaluation”, which is more convenient in this context.
4. Some technical errors on p. 3, section 2.2 (Error! Reference source not found).
5. Table 3. P-values are usually companions of the primary statistics used, such as t-statistics of Student or another criterion. It is necessary to provide the primary statistics and embrace p-values in parentheses afterwards.
6. Conclusions are too short and does not include some figures that could ground the main implications of the paper. The same goes for abstract.
7. References does not follow the guidelines of the journal title 

Author Response

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

In this work an interesting assessment of urban forest ecosystem services was explored over different urban land uses in Kyoto city. The manuscript is well written and structured and I think that issue is very interesting for journal’ readers. Nevertheless, some minor concerns should be addressed before publication.

Specific comments:

1. Line 2. I think that the scale issue was not deeply and properly explored in this manuscript. It appears for the first time in the discussions section and not significant experimental design was explain to analysed it. Therefore, I suggest to remove it from the title.
2. please add the cartographic datum (I suppose WGS84).
3. The main limitation of this study is the absence of how ecosystem services/monetary value were computed. Authors referred to existing methods but could be interesting report formulae and parameters used to model ecosystem services. Since I-tree models are well known and adopted in literature, the parameters used to compute results is dependent by the location. It could be interesting report them (maybe as supplemental materials).
4. L150-151. Please provide the allometric equations and their error if available.
5. L154-155. please provide growth rates
6. how did you survey LAI?
7. How did you set infiltration values?
8. Since ANOVA is parametric test, you have to prove that data are normally distributed. Without this assumption all test results are weak.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors

Thank you for your response and understanding of the comments and suggestions. I will recommend your manuscript for publishing.

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Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have addressed my comments. I recommend the manuscript for publication.

Reviewer 3 Report

I am satisfied with a substantial revisions of the paper. Good luck.