Review Reports - Hydrological Properties of Soil and Litter Layers of Four Forest Types Restored in the Gully Erosion Area of Latosol in South China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper provides interesting results, and the research topic is within this journal's scope. The authors made an interesting contribution to the field of soil hydrology. There are some comments that I ask the authors to address.

General Comments:

1. Introduction and discussion do not provide sufficient background and include all relevant references. I found many related papers:

** https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejrh.2022.101102

** https://doi.org/10.3390/f10090730

2. In L 35: Without testing climate change in the future, this statement should be changed.

Minor comments:

L 10-11: I prefer to delete this sentence (the abstract should be summarized as much as possible).

L 71: "The forest litter is the second active layer...", it's not clear; rephrase it (I think, it would be nice to say: forest canopy is the first active layer and the next one is the litter layer).

L 69-71 with the following lines: there is no coherency here.

Table 1: "Average Breast Diameter" is the average of Diameter at breast height (DBH)?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

Happy Chinese New Year! This a moment of joyful sharing, and good luch for you!

A point-by-point response to your comments, Please see the attachment.

Special thanks to you for your good comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Hoping to help improve this work, which is quite interesting, which tries to represent how water is retained in the layers of vegetation achieved in different eroded gullies, which were reforested with different species.

Within the observations that were made to determine changes in the water retention, with some, there are discrepancies because the definition of the concepts is not explained clearly or do not coincide, as well as some calculations and indices are not presented and above all their meaning is not clear, please correct that so that the article can be read more fluently. The most relevant are mentioned below.

Materials and methods. Please include a map that concisely locates where in the world the site is, with the appropriate legends

Line 144-152…rewrite…unclear. soil layers form a profile or not? because soil layers and soil profile are handled as if different, please clarify.

Table 1. Identify the units of "a".

Equation 1…which means 0.85 and this is considered as field capacity, even if it is an organic material in process of destruction…"water retained against gravity", right?

Equation 3 correcting… is that field capacity? "Field capacity is expressed in amount of water/dry weight of soil" or explain the criteria for using these variables, please

point 2.4…I don't understand the mathematical development and how you used it to determine the water conservation capacity, please be more specific.

Line 238, correct the data of 64.97.39

Lines 264-273 How do I calculate the tons, where is the density of the layers of organic material? And these layers are part of the soil profile? Or the organic is independent? According to the ratio of the graphs in figure 2, the densities of the organic materials were around 0.001 g/cm3, was that so?

The depths of organic matter, its ability to absorb water, were taken, but they mention 2 cm thick with a capacity to absorb up to 300% of its weight in water, that would mean that for the water to infiltrate it would have to rain an equivalent amount at that value... and then the infiltration would begin, and the water intake by the plants, or not?

Line 336-337…the bulk density includes the number of pores in the soil structure, so if the bulk density increases with to more soil depth, the porosity must also increase…please explain or correct.

Table 3. Layers 0-10, include the organic layer, or not?

Section 3.5, explain it please, I don't understand what it means and how did you get so many indexes?