The Carbon Storage of Reforestation Plantings on Degraded Lands of the Red Soil Region, Jiangxi Province, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThanks, the article presented as I believe that it contains interesting information. The major issue I find along the text is the format, that should be improved.
Introduction and methodology give enough information to understand the objectives and reproduce the experiment. The only thing I miss is to know if the plots had slope or were flat.
Table 1 can be improved, I do not know if it is a problem with the format but it is difficult to read the columns (the first and last).
Table 2 does not content “carbon content conversion coefficients”, I think they are reflected in Table 3.
In the Table 3, It is important to know the conversion coefficients come from the standards considered in China or other literature.
In the figure 3, not all the acronyms used are indicated in the text, for instance TN and TP although it is easy to deduce the meaning of both. It is supposed that the same parameters are represented in Figure 4.
In general, the article would be right to be published after making some minor changes and adding some minor details (information in tables and figures) and checking the format.
Surely, all of this can be corrected during the editorial process.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsAuthor did a wonderful job and revised the manuscript as per the suggestions. Now MS is fit for publication and accepted for further processing.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageAuthor did a wonderful job and revised the manuscript as per the suggestions. Now MS is fit for publication and accepted for further processing.
Author Response
I appreciate that you found the manuscript acceptable. I also took your advice to heart and had the text polished by experts.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
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
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe restoration of forest ecosystems should be associated to the rehabilitation and restoration of soils. Vegetation recovery influences soil recovery as well as this recovery acts positively into the vegetation cover. This is a positive point of this article.
As a suggestion, this would be the view that we have to take into consideration when talking about land/forest restoration. I understand that authors have centered the attention in carbon sink as a major concern.
In my opinion, the article is not presented in such a way to show the good results obtained. The work seems of great interest but needs to be re-organized among other considerations.
Moreover, it is important to distinguish between carbon sequestration as a physiological process carried out by living organisms, and carbon storage that occurs in soils as a subsequent process through dead matter.
As several concepts have been used along the text. I would like authors to clarify them. There is some controversy regarding its use and it is important in the article to indicate the definitions followed by the authors.
I disagree with the term “natural restoration” because if no action is applied, it maybe natural recovery which seems to happen in the control site.
Ecosystem carbon stocks, do you consider soil and death organisms? I mean that living tissue is still a possible source of carbon dioxide so the role as carbon stock is not so clear.
Does carbon sequestration rate refer to living organisms as this is a physiological function? I disagree in part with the formula of page 6 conceptually; it is a simple balance of biomass and not necessary means carbon sequestration rate (regarding the physiological function).
The ecosystem C storage function, what is this? Soil storage function? What do you mean? Which are the components of this function? Is it SOC stock?
In the section materials and methods, please refer the soil type to one of the international considered classification systems (WRB or Soil Taxonomy).
Please give references about the methods used for data collection if possible (section 2.2) and in general for the other determinations.
In general, the article needs to be re-structured and organized, even in the results. I suggest the following changes because I believe that authors have done a hard work and the results have a lot of interest.
- Clarify the definitions of the concepts that are going to be used in the introduction: restoration (done by humans), natural recovery, carbon sequestration, biomass production, soil storage, ecosystem carbon storage, among others.
- Re-structure the objectives given in the introduction as: biomass carbon sequestration (tress and rest of vegetation), soil storage, ecosystem carbon storage
- Complete the references for the methods used, indicate the environmental variables used because most of them are indices not environmental variables.
- Structure the results as: biomass tree production, shrub and rest of vegetation biomass production, soil carbon storage, the sum of all of them, finally the correlation with environmental variables and indices (vegetation or ecological indices).
Discussion is too long and disconnected from the results. As a suggestion, results and discussion can be a better strategy to show the work done. Moreover, try to join the discussion with the possibilities of restoration of degraded land/soils in other part of the world.
In the section Conclusions, it is not necessary to write again the results obtained numerically, center the conclusions in the results and future actions that can be derived from them.
Some minor comments to improve the article:
Line 17: strat-egy maybe “stra-tegy” to read the word easily, but it is assumed that it is a default of the template used and later will be checked during editing process (lines 53, 58, 83, 111…263…).
Please “et al” is wrong, it should be “et al.” (from the Latin et alii), check in the whole text.
The style of the tables should be checked, for instance the bold letter use.
I insist that the article, well written and results well presented, has a lot of potential.
Although I am not a native speaker, it seems that article needs a English grammar review.
Author Response
Please see the attachment. The academic editor said that the previous revision description was too perfunctory and has been described in detail. Please review it again. Thanks
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe article contributes to the vast literature on carbon stock studies in forests ecosystems. Despite that the actual plots used by authors are located in one place with almost no variability, the manuscript is well done and deserves to be considered for publication. However, before that some major concerns need to be addressed.
1. The abstract is well written, but seems to be a bit wordy. Some enshortening would be beneficial to improve the readability of text. On the contrary, keywords are too general and less numerous.
2. According to the data from Table 1, all the stands are of the same age (30 years). So, the variability of results is limited by that fact. This particularity must be clearly detailed in the text.
3. The literature must be enriched with a more broad scope of the world examples on the same topic.
Author Response
The academic editor said that the previous revision description was too perfunctory and has been described in detail. Please review it again. Thanks！
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsTopic of the paper is very interested and timely but few corrections are required before acceptance (see attached file).
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment. The academic editor said that the previous revision description was too perfunctory and has been described in detail. Please review it again. Thanks！
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThanks for improving the article and please, understand that what we want is to help authors to improve the paper.
Although not all the comments have been included in the article. For instance, a citation (a literature reference) indicating the method used for data collection, if possible.
Some minor details and format style surely will be reviewed and corrected during the editorial process.
Author Response
Hello reviewer, the references have been reinserted as per your request and the references have been added to the data collection section. Thanks
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsGood luck
Author Response
Thanks！
