Responses of the Distribution Pattern of the Suitable Habitat of Juniperus tibetica Komarov to Climate Change on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

I consider your manuscript to be well written, scientifically sound, and dealing with a topical and interesting subject.

Some information on the species biology (such as pollen and seed dispersal) could be included and related to the climate change suitability analysis. This would enable some more specific deductions on the conservation status of the species (IUCN red list “vulnerable”) in certain areas. Here are some comments and suggestions that I hope will be constructive and helpful:

- I suggest including a short paragraph on seed and pollen dispersal strategies and ranges of Juniperus. tibetica in the introduction part in order to compare and discuss the spatially explicit modeling results in terms of predicted change of suitable habitat in the future with an estimate of migration rate of the species. This would show whether the species is likely to naturally keep pace with the rate of predicted climate change or not. For example: Lazarus ED, McGill BJ (2014) Pushing the Pace of Tree Species Migration. PLoS ONE 9(8): e105380. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0105380

- You could compare the modeled suitable habitat of the LGM with the current suitable habitat to identify potentially important refugia (like in the paper from Russel et al. 2014 that you cited) and to check whether those areas are likely to remain also in the future. This would show if areas with potentially high genetic diversity are under threat and together with the results of the estimated migration rates you could identify important areas for in situ and ex situ conservation to assure the long-term viability of the species.

-I also recommend considering the following sources of predictor variables for future studies: CMIP6 downscaled future climate projections and related WorldClim v2.1 as baseline climate (https://www.worldclim.org/data/cmip6/cmip6climate.html). ISRIC soil data (https://soilgrids.org/).

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The current study entitled "Responses of the distribution pattern of suitable habitat of Juniperus tibetica Komarov to climate change on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau (QTP)" authored by Zhang et al.. The research is conducted well and represented in a good way. However, I have some concerns related to the study which need to be looked at by the authors especially, the writing style which includes representation of previous research should be corrected (also mentioned in the attached file). The material method section, result and discussion are well presented. However, I suggest extensive editing of the English language and style. imultaneously, the quality of the picture is not good at all especially the font size and thus should be corrected

The specific comment was given in the attached file

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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