Review Reports - Trends in Brazil’s Forestry Education: Overview of the Forest Engineering Programs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Trends in Brazil’s Forestry Education: overview of the forest engineering courses

Line	Comment
13	Use of the word “course” is misleading. I assume the authors are referring to forestry “programs”.
17	Unlikely, 13 professors per course, must be program.
18	No professional experience? Or no academic experience.
21	Candidates or applicants?
32	One scenario?
36-37	Highly recommend that the document undergo a strong language edit.
49	What course? What is being termed “the course”?
58-59	Many programs fit into “natural resources and environment”.
69-70	This assertion should have a citation.
84-85	Perhaps, this opinion should be left to the reader to make
90	How many?
100	I would place this information in an Annex or table
124	Not clear how number of professors could serve as a proxy for course structure?
133	Curriculum vitae?
138	Do you mean, any experience at all? OK, I see you answer that question in the next line. Surprising.
167	It would be interesting to understand the thinking behind this regression
175	What milestones?
175-179	This sentence mixes a lot of different ideas that don’t fit together in a logical way.
Figure 2	Looks like Caatinga has four programs
Figure 3	In the Y axis, put Graduates per year in…
203	What do you mean by “vacancy occupancy rate”?
205	Not necessary to indicate “varied by 800%. More important is to discuss how an undergraduate forestry program can function with 4 professors.
208	Not clear to me
Figure 4	In the Y axis for the three bar charts, you indicate “Frequency of courses (%), but aren’t they absolute numbers, not percentages?
Figure 5	It looks like the one program with 35 professors has pulled up the regression line. Programs with 6-7 professors did great, while programs with 10 professors underperformed. I don’t think this finding is very useful.
216-225	This paragraph does present important findings. Figure 6 could be formatted a bit more clearly, clearly indicating the separation between the 60% group and the 40% group. Also, I suspect that the calculations are not correct. For example, in the red box, you would have to indicate the % of professors that work in the same university that have not experience. The red and brown boxes would have to add up to 100%, not 60%. The same logic would apply to the professors that work in different institutions.
242	But there are still more candidates than slots available.
Figure 8	Rather than Ano, put Year. Like in Figure 4, I would revisit the labelling of the Y axis. Why include information on the ranking of the University of Sao Paulo in the figure caption?
Section 3.3	This information, if included, should be explored to a greater degree. What makes this information important?
264	Since the number of programs has increased markedly in the past 20 years, perhaps the total number of applicants has not reduced as much as being implied. Rather, the applicants are distributed across a greater number of programs.
267-268	This seems to contradict what you stated above
281	Perhaps the forestry programs should adapt to include thematic areas students are more interested in.
292-299	This paragraph is quite speculative.
304	Indeed, this is a worrisome finding.
307-308	But you indicate that 100% lack necessary skills
310	What disparity?
314-315	To what degree are programs linking with forestry initiatives? Do students carry out their thesis with these initiatives?
Question	Are some of the other rapidly growing programs filling important gaps in the forestry sector, that are not being filled by forest engineering programs?
316-325	This paragraph includes a lot of topics and concepts that are not well tied together. Furthermore, the issues raised were not introduced earlier in the paper.
331-336	This is an important point that connects well with your findings.
345-346	This is another important point
Comment	A discussion on the difference between knowledge and skills/competencies would be interesting to integrate in this paper. Students and employers seem to want skills. Skills can only be developed through practice.
Comment	Connotation of “Forest Engineering” in Latin America versus other parts of the world. For example, in Latin America, I was always called “un ingeniero forestal”, but I had an undergraduate degree in Forest Biology and a masters in Forest Genetics. For an international audience, it would be important to indicate what is meant by Forest Engineer in the paper.
Comment	It is quite likely that many of the “courses” that are needed in the forestry sector, are found in other programs like “Natural Resources and the Environment"
350-351	What gap?
353	Until now, the paper really hasn’t explored “participatory approaches and societal involvement”, so the reader is unclear what is being proposed here.
357-358	In Brazil?
364-365	Wouldn’t required skills vary by context in a country like Brazil? Shouldn’t this be mentioned here?

I would suggest that this paper be edited by a native English speaker. While it is not difficult to read, there are problems with some terms (course versus program, for example - also what is meant by forest engineering?) and a number of cases where topics tend to be mixed in the same sentence. I strong language edit might serve to address these issues.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The objective is clear and seems to attract both academic and professional readers. Although the methodology, the obtained results, and the discussion section are appropriate, there are just a few minor comments to improve the research.

1. In Figure 2, colors of the main part of the figure are not match those of the legends. Please check them.

2. As of Figure 9 and the related multiple regression model, the equation has two independent variables but no constant. It is recommended that the model should be the one that have a constant.

That's all; thank you for the contribution to the journal.

Author Response

Thanks for your comments. We adjusted both figure 2 and 9.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Nice job improving the paper. It's clear you devoted considerable time and effort to address my observations. I would suggest one revision. In figure 6, place alongside the percentages, the absolute numbers. For example, 46% (105 professors) with no....