Relationship between Rural Settlements’ Plant Communities and Environmental Factors in Hilly Area of Southeast China
, Wenjing Han 2,3, Chang Zhang 2,3, Jiali Jin 2,3, Kaiyue Wei 2,3, Jiao Zhao 2,3 and Xinyu Wang 2,3Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Please check the attached file for my comments and suggestions.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
General comments:
The aim of this article was to address the relationships and correlations of plant communities that are planted in rural settlements with environmental factors in Southeast China.
The article's main contribution is that it gives suggestions for the optimization of sustainable development of the rural settlements in the plant environment in a scientific and modern planning way.
The Authors tried to present the impact of human activities, architecture and topography characteristics on plant communities focusing on the biological environment in the settlements. I think it is a good idea of presenting indices and qualitative categorical data. The article can be published after the suggested revisions in the manuscript.
Specific comments:
Line 41
….areas are not only the basic unit ….
Line 119
… construction terrible, thus contributing the ecological value…
Lines 133-136
There are 8 heritage sites, 36 beautiful leisure villages, 1,162 characteristic villages 133 of rural leisure and tourism (residential cluster villages) have been built, and 100 beautiful rural 134 demonstration towns and 300 characteristic boutique villages have been cultivated and created in 135 Zhejiang (Zhejiang Provincial Bureau of statistics, 2018).
The meaning of the sentence is not clear, please revise it
Line 142
bamboo forest area (2,533.3 hm2) …
What is the unit hm2 ? Do you mean ha or square meters?.
Table 2
instead of Mainly species -> Main species
Lines 91, 253 & 533
Indexes and indices. Please be consistent with this word, use the form indices
Line 537
… to comprehensive study the plant community distribution…. -> … to study comprehensively the plant community distribution…
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Line 63: proposed by whom? Rewrite the sentences inline 62-64. I think it is not necessary to mention the president. Maybe it would be appropriate to say Chinese authority.
Line 64: Why and is capitalized there?
Line 74: Why and is capitalized there?
Line 86: What is eco-economic species? Is it a common word (a combination of ecology and economics?) Please clarify.
Line 89-90: please delete with and replace it with because of.
Line 102: Please give space.
Line 111-112: Please provide space.
Line 138: What are the characteristics... villages?
Figure 1: Please provide the scale outside of the legend. Provide the source of the image.
Line 204-206: As the authors mentioned, linear regression and other regression did not perform well, and therefore they used spearman's rank correlation. I would ask the authors to say that in the paper.
Line 297: did you mention something about the Monte Carlo test in the method section? Is it necessary to say?
Line 531: provide space.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
