Agroforestry and Biodiversity

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Amir comments on: Agroforestry and Biodiversity

General Comments:

The authors have presented an overview on the role of Agroforestry towards enhancing biodiversity. They have covered a good number of published literatures, which supports their review topic. The work can be published with some minor corrections as suggested directly on the attached MS and also as listed below. There are some sentence formation errors (Lines 17 – 23) that have been highlighted in the MS and the authors should address these suggested changes. Also, the authors should discuss one aspect, for example bird diversity, in one section (faunal diversity) and should not repeat bird diversity in another section (Line # 414). What is said in lines 411-416 can be mentioned under faunal diversity?  In addition to these suggested changes, the authors also have to address the following:

-          Provide a description of ‘blind spots’, for example, genetic diversity, in your review that were beyond the scope of your focus but are relevant to this review (If are available).

-          Present an “overview of Knowledge Gaps”in the conclusion in detail. For example, you can describe simulated data derived from agroforestry models. Since there are some models that can be used to simulate different aspects of agroforestry systems, such as APSIM, HiSAFE, etc. Therefore, it would be useful if you report the capability of these models in predicting biodiversity in agroforestry systems. If you all cannot predict, then list the challenges associated with generating biodiversity indices using these models.

-          Please present quantified values comparing biodiversity in AF systems and adjacent ecosystems such as agricultural crop lands, grassland, woodlots, etc. It could help to enhance understanding biodiversity differences between ecosystems. For example, you all have indicated in few parts of the manuscript, e.g.  L246-249.  It could be also valuable to present biodiversity indices associated with agroforestry systems in different agro-climatic conditions (such as water limited, radiation limited, fertility limited) and rank the efficiency of AF in enhancing biodiversity in each of these conditions. (for example see comment 1 and 8 below and Line 278-290).

Minor Comments:

1.       L105: in the introduction of Agroforestry and Floral Diversity, authors have mentioned about the negative effect of modern agricultural farming on BD which leads to reduced ecosystem functions and compared this with enhanced BD associated with agroforestry. However, this part mainly focused on presenting spices richness in AG rather than presenting papers that quantified and compared BD in AF systems with adjacent agricultural lands.

2.       L 70 - Fig1. In axis title: “Forest plantation” should be correct.

3.       L 72- 79. This paragraph focuses on the “positive relationships between BD and ecosystem services of AF”, however, it has just listed the AF’s services. Where is the relationship explanation between BD and ecosystem services of AF?

4.       L95-99 – It would be helpful if you could provide the number of reviewed publications in different regions (temperate, Mediterranean, Tropical, ….).

5.       L137-138: add  some references for legislation.

6.       L152-153: Need to provide references.

7.       L183-184: Could be: Tomich et al. ([67] and [68]) instead of “Tomich et al. [67] and Tomich et al. [68]”.

8.        Line 219: You mentioned that “A review by Buck et al. showed greater bird diversity in cocoa and coffee AF in Southeast Asia and Central America”. Could you provide the details of comparison? Greater than which systems? And provide the values for diversity indices.

9.       Line 230: which “authors” do you mean?

10.   Fig 7: no axis title.

11.   Some few typo and formation errors were noted. For example, on reference no 128, year is not bold, and in line 382, 11109 is cited as reference, which is incorrect. Please go through the manuscript and correct the errors.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

see attached pdf

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Review Comments

This review is about a manuscript prepared based on how development or improvement of agroforestry can improve decline biodiversity. There are many potential solutions to improve biodiversity but the author presented a nice case where all the possible option of agroforestry can be implemented to improve biodiversity. This manuscript includes much recent literature and has a strong story. This research is not entirely new but has been presented in a newer approach and provide very useful data and promising results, thus critical for other researchers in a similar research area. Sometimes lack of the importance of agroforestry development does not help to grow biodiversity in a holistic way, therefore, this paper might be an important addition. I would give a minor revision to this manuscript. I have given some comments below with an intention to further improve the manuscript. I would reconsider the manuscript for publication if these minor changes are made and resubmitted. 

Comments:

In general: In general, more robust statistical approached could be implemented to represent the data such as ‘effect size calculation’ etc. which is very common nowadays to report/review this type work and can be considered as ‘meta-analysis’. Any such attempt might help to improve the quality of this manuscript and might be accepted by audiences more broadly. But, this is just a suggestion for the authors. They can decide their own way of resenting data.

Fig. 7: Please mark the axes (axis name).

Page 5: Please try to avoid constructing small paragraphs with only 2-3 sentences. This can be changed into a bigger paragraph with a reasonable number of sentences or statement. It looks nicer and makes more meaningful paragraphs.

Author Response

see attached pdf

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf