Severe Drought Still Affects Reproductive Traits Two Years Later in a Common Garden Experiment of Frangula alnus

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The perpetuation instinct of species also works in Frangula alnus. Plants react and respond to stress with more abundant fruiting and seeds with a high germination percentage, which is highlighted and correctly demonstrated in the content of the article. This happens over a determined period of time, depending on the intensity of the stress factor and the adaptability of some origins. The proveniences need to be identified and promoted, especially in moisture deficit areas. I recommend for further researches to be target on other species, possibly affected by drought.

 

Author Response

Thanks a lot for the positive reaction!

Reviewer 2 Report

The presented manuscript is extremely interesting in the context of the long-term impact of climate change on the growth and reproductive characteristics of woody plants. The research concerns a species of shrub common in a temperate climate, Frangula alnus that fruits are an important food source for birds. The results could also be used in modeling the response to the drought of woody crops. The obtained results generate further questions regarding the duration of this effect or to what extent the obtained model is reproducible in other species.

Authors should include papers nos (16), 39, 42, 46 in the introduction and methodology and describe their relationship with the currently presented results to avoid the problem of self-plagiarism.

Minor comments:

- Please consider changing the title to:  

After effects of severe drought on reproductive traits in a common garden experiment of Frangula alnus

or After effects of severe drought on reproductive traits of Frangula alnus.

 

- Table 1: use total separately for control and drought

- Fig 3: … on a shrub in 2019 according …..  

Author Response

We have repeated below the comments of reviewer 2 and have added our answers in italic.

 

The presented manuscript is extremely interesting in the context of the long-term impact of climate change on the growth and reproductive characteristics of woody plants. The research concerns a species of shrub common in a temperate climate, Frangula alnus that fruits are an important food source for birds. The results could also be used in modeling the response to the drought of woody crops. The obtained results generate further questions regarding the duration of this effect or to what extent the obtained model is reproducible in other species.

Authors should include papers nos (16), 39, 42, 46 in the introduction and methodology and describe their relationship with the currently presented results to avoid the problem of self-plagiarism.

We have added now a paragraph in the introduction, describing the former results of drought experiments on F. alnus. We have stressed now, also in other parts of the text (abstract, discussion) that this paper focusses on the after effects of the drought treatment, two years after the treatment, specifically for reproductive traits, as this is new information not yet studied/published before.

Minor comments:

- Please consider changing the title to:  

After effects of severe drought on reproductive traits in a common garden experiment of Frangula alnus

or After effects of severe drought on reproductive traits of Frangula alnus.

We have changed the title: “Severe drought still affects reproductive traits two years later in a common garden experiment of Frangula alnus”

 

- Table 1: use total separately for control and drought

We have divided the totals in total for control and total for drought

- Fig 3: … on a shrub in 2019 according …..  

We have in the caption of figure 3 “…on a shrub….”, as suggested. The year is 2020.

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript of Mijnsbrugge et al. describes the effect of water limitation on berry production and seedling emergence in three provenances of Frangula alnus following two years of well watering. In my opinion, the manuscript does not provide sufficient novelty to deserve to be disseminated in Forests. The same conclusion can be drawn from the precedent manuscripts already published in Forests by the same authors (doi:10.3390/f11111186, https://doi.org/10.3390/f13111744, https://doi.org/10.3390/f14020348 ). Taken together, the information drawns form the previous manuscripts already indicated the effect of water limitation on plant phenology and berry production as well as the different response of provenances suggesting the need of provenance translocation as an anticipation to the warming climate.

In my opinion authors should move on different topics such as the effect of water limitation on seedlings derived from previous water-limited mother plants or try to investigate the epigenetic (and/or transcriptomics) effects postulated in the previous manuscripts.

The effect on height increment should be evaluated considering separately the increase in 2019 and 2020.

Author Response

We have copied the comments of reviewer 3, and we have added our replies in italic.

 

The manuscript of Mijnsbrugge et al. describes the effect of water limitation on berry production and seedling emergence in three provenances of Frangula alnus following two years of well watering. In my opinion, the manuscript does not provide sufficient novelty to deserve to be disseminated in Forests. The same conclusion can be drawn from the precedent manuscripts already published in Forests by the same authors (doi:10.3390/f11111186, https://doi.org/10.3390/f13111744, https://doi.org/10.3390/f14020348 ). Taken together, the information drawns form the previous manuscripts already indicated the effect of water limitation on plant phenology and berry production as well as the different response of provenances suggesting the need of provenance translocation as an anticipation to the warming climate.

We have added a paragraph in the introduction describing the former results of drought experiments on F. alnus. In this way we make it more clear that in this manuscript we focus on the effects of drought on reproductive traits two years after the drought treatment. In former publications, the effects on reproduction were only described for the year of the drought treatment itself, not two years later. And, not all effects on reproduction in the year of the drought treatment and two years after the drought treatment were similar! We realise that we had to make this more clear in the manuscript. We have described these differences in the discussion more clearly now. For instance, we describe more clearly now that in the year of the drought treatment, berry production was reduced by the drought, whereas in this manuscript, we observed that two years after the drought the berry production was augmented, which is a fundamental difference. The results on the stone weight also differed, we likewise made this more clear in the discussion now. We also adjusted the abstract to make it more clear that we focus in this manuscript on the effects two years after the drought treatment and not in the year of the drought treatment.

The presented results do not really suggest translocation of provenances as an anticipation to the climate warming. In the conclusions we write: ”The observation that the local provenance produced more berries in comparison to a more northernly and a more southernly originating provenance suggests that translocation of provenances as an anticipation to the warming climate (assisted migration) should be considered with care.”

In my opinion authors should move on different topics such as the effect of water limitation on seedlings derived from previous water-limited mother plants or try to investigate the epigenetic (and/or transcriptomics) effects postulated in the previous manuscripts.

The effect on height increment should be evaluated considering separately the increase in 2019 and 2020.

We understand this suggestion, but the focus of this paper was to indicate the effects on reproductive traits, not on growth traits. Only because of the re-allocation of resources hypothesis, the growth reduction in 2020 (two years after the drought treatment) was relevant to address in this manuscript. Also, the effect of the drought on the growth traits one year after the drought treatment (in 2019) has already been described in a former paper which focusses on the effects of the drought on growth traits (references are added in the manuscript). We specifically indicated this aspect in the extra paragraph in the introduction.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have made the aim of the work clearer in this new manuscript version. Now the difference with the previous manuscript are well remarked and this greatly improves the manuscript readability and novelty. I still believe that the manuscript is little innovative and not original but considering the positive comments of the other two reviewers I reconsider my first suggestion.

Please carefully check my comments in the attached file. I suggest to move Figure S2a, S5 and table S1 in the manuscript. I also reccommend to make sure to remove all typos to the manuscript.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx