Critical Analysis of the Past, Present, and Future of Dendrochemistry: A Systematic Literature Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Thanks for the opportunity to review this much-improved resubmission.

 

Author Response

Thank you for reviewing the manuscript and for providing valuable feedback.

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

This is a resubmitted manuscript, while I have not seen any response to the comments and suggestions given by the reviewers in the last round. Generally, the authors answered some of my concerns for the last version of the manuscript. For example, they updated the method to identify the related published studies in the revision, deriving much more materials and making their conclusion more solid. While, I still have several concerns on the revised version of this manuscript.

1.     I suggest making the challenges that dendrochemistry met in lines 65-69 and other places to be a single section in the manuscript. The authors may also make more in-depth analysis on the challenges this subdiscipline. This may provide new clues for the development of future research in this area and deserved to be highlighted.

2.     From my point of view, the result section should be more focused on history, challenges, and opportunities of dendrochemistry, rather than the presented contents. I think the part in lines 150-184 is not need, and it can be instead by the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram in the supplementary materials. Or, it should be a part of materials and methods, rather than a part of results.

3.     I still do not think the 3.1 and 3.2 sections, in which the countries of the authors and the published journals of that studies in this area were shown, is meaningful. They can provide few new clues for the development of this subdiscipline. Or you can show these contents by a diagram or a table in the supplementary. Moreover, instead, a comparison among the results/conclusions derived from different regions or countries may be more meaningful and significant.

4.     In the discussion, the authors used a large amount of text to describe the history of this sub discipline, while the summaries of shortages or challenges that the studies in the area faced based on these text are not in-depth or are even missing. So, the discussion section should be more condensed and further refinement.

5.     There are also several errors in the text. For example, in line 149, “3.0” should be changed to “3”. In line 165, the PRISMA 2020 flow diagram in the supplementary materials should be cited. In lines 496-565 ∂ (partialis) should be δ (delta).

A moderate editing of English language may be required.

Author Response

Thank you for taking the time to review the manuscript and for the valuable feedback you provided. Please see the attachment for the replies to the specific comments. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

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

  Please see attached.

Comments for author File: Comments.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This article aims to review how the dendrochemical study has evolved over the last 40 years, and to discuss what are the challenges this study field is facing. They further hypothesize where dendrochemical study may be heading in the future and provided recommendations for future research. Knowledge on the challenges and opportunities of dendrochemical research is crucial for our understanding on environmental changes, pollution, as well as anthropogenic influences on them. This is an important work.

However, I have several concerns on this manuscript:

1. The authors used three key words, “dendrochemisty”, “tree-ring”, and “chemistry”, to collect related research articles. However, a lot of articles that uses tree ring to discover the change histories of heavy metals did not use “dendrochemisty” or “chemistry” as key words. Instead, the specific studied element name, “pollution”, or other words were always used as key words in their published articles. You can check the references, such as, Bellis et al. The Science of the Total Environment 295 (2002): 91–100; Garbe-Schönberg et al. Environmental Geology 32 (1) 1997; Kang et al. Science Bulletin 63 (2018): 1328–1331; Kang et al. Ecological Indicators 104 (2019): 24–31; Lukaszewsk, Trees, 2(1988): 1-6; Mihaljevič et al. Water Air Soil Pollut 216 (2011):657–668; Nabais et al. The Science of the Total Environment 232(1999): 33- 37; Novak et al. Environmental Pollution 159(2011): 204-211; Novak et al. Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 74(2010): 4207–4218; Opydo et al. Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 161(2005): 175–192; Saint-Laurent et al. Water Air Soil Pollut 209 (2010): 451–466; Tommasini et al. Applied Geochemistry 15(2000):891-900; Vaganov et al, Doklady Biological Sciences, 453(2013):375–379. This will make the number of the related articles underestimated and finally has impact on the final conclusion of this study. This is my biggest concern on this work, so I suggest the authors to recheck the result of article search.

2. I did not think the analysis on countries and publish journals of dendrochemical studies in section 3.1 and 3.2 is such important and necessary for this article. Maybe, it is better to focus on the development of theory and technology of this discipline. Moreover, as my first concern, the result in these parts and figures may need to be check and revised if the number of the related articles was underestimated.

3. In the abstract, I suggested the authors to add more details on the challenges that dendrochemical study is facing, just like the details on recommendations for future research you gave.

A moderate editing of English language required.