Managing Rather Than Avoiding “Difficulties” in Building Landscape Resilience

Reviewer 1

I really appreciated the topic and the critical perspective of the paper.

Dear Reviewer,

Thanks so much for your constructive feedback. We welcome your interest in this paper. Much appreciated!

I suggest to modify table 1 in order to have a more compact presentation of the 7 “difficulties” (there is also a mistyping in the caption). The contents are relevant and it would be more readable reproducing the representative literature line in another way.

Sorry about the mistyping. We fixed it now! Thanks a lot for helping us identify it.

We now rearranged the table, rewrote some blanks and add more reference based on your suggestions.

The §4 dedicated to the case study and the discussion could be better linked to the theoretical framework

We have restructured the results section as you suggested and added and rewrote some sentences to clearly present a fact: The NZD case demonstrates that a strategy of building the NZD’s resilience has improved conservation of the NZD’s forest ecosystems but overlooked trade-offs between sustaining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales.

Second, we removed the table that explains Figure 5 from the appendix. Yes, we quite agree with you that needs some examples to summarise the main findings clearly. Here, we believe that Figure 5 and Table 2 (now) can help to link back to the theoretical framework.

The conclusions could be reconnected with the theoretical premises

We entirely agree with your suggestion. We rewrote the conclusion based on your suggestions. Here it is:

Resilience represents an ability to live, learn from, and develop with changes, some of which are unpredictable (Moritz et al., 2014, Biggs et al., 2015, Quinlan et al., 2016, Berkes, 2017). It is unavoidable that our understandings of these complexities will be incomplete as these systems are dynamic and may have unpredictable characteristics. From this per-spective, building landscape resilience could be an effective management strategy for co-ordinating the needs of different actors who are dependent on the landscape only as long as the approaches proposed or initiated by managers or researchers can enhance the landscape’s ability to coexist with changes and uncertainties justly (Knill and Tosun, 2012, Moritz et al., 2014).

However, building resilience without clear targets and boundaries has perverse impacts. Some groups consume resources and services at the expense of others. Seven categories of difficulties have been defined that should be dealt with when using resilience concepts to instruct management, namely resilience for whom, what, when, when, where, why, as well as can and how we apply resilience. Using the seven difficulties to question management strategies and plans can identify assumptions behind building resilience to achieve more just and sustainable outcomes more transparently. We find these difficulties are always overlooked and avoided despite their instructive roles to achieve just land-scape management. The NZD case demonstrates that a strategy of building the NZD’s re-silience has reduced to conserve the NZD’s ecology and overlooks trade-offs between sus-taining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales. Similar conflicts between conservation and development have also been reported by scholars like Zhang (2018) and Ding (2015) in assessing the pastoral land-scape. Future researchers, manager and decision-makers are thereby needed to think re-silience more normatively and clarify questions we summarised in the framework before approaching building landscape. In addition, undesirable resilience as highlighted by Dornelles et al. (2020) deserves more attentionto avoid blurring claims, such as building resilience of the whole system or country, and better identifying trade-offs. 

Reviewer 2

It looks like the authors have done a lot of work including reviewing near 100,000 literatures (see line 59), and conducting social science interviews several times, but the manuscript is rife with errors and far from scientific research, not from natural science perspective nor from social science perspective: fundamental understanding for resilience and  Social-Ecological System is lacking, the logic is incoherent, this research paper is vacuous.

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your feedback.

Clearly, our work does not appeal to you. The other three reviewers have a different perspective. Interdisciplinary work such as ours can be challenging for those who view such work from a particular disciplinary perspective.

First, you said that our manuscript is rife with errors. However these errors are not detailed so we cannot respond to them.

Second, you said that our manuscript is far from scientific research from either natural or social science perspectives. The journal Sustainability has published many tremendous and highly-cited interdisciplinary papers. Here are some:

BERKES, F., 2017. Environmental Governance for the Anthropocene? Social-Ecological Systems, Resilience, and Collaborative Learning, Sustainability, 9(7).

BÜRGI, M., ALI, P., CHOWDHURY, A., HEINIMANN, A., HETT, C., KIENAST, F., MONDAL, M. K., UPRETI, B. R. & VERBURG, P. H., 2017. Integrated Landscape Approach: Closing the Gap between Theory and Application, Sustainability, 9(8).

LIU, W., XU, J. & LI, J., 2018. The Influence of Poverty Alleviation Resettlement on Rural Household Livelihood Vulnerability in the Western Mountainous Areas, China, Sustainability, 10(8).

We aspire to contribute academic literature of similar character and quality.

Third, you talked about how our understanding of resilience and SESs is lacking, but what should be the proper understanding? We’ve not only defined what is SESs and but also captured most available popular frameworks and practices rooted in SESs. Here it is the paragraph we wrote:

An SES is also called a human–nature or human–environment system, and it is a perpetually dynamic and complex system with continuous interactions of many subsystems, such as a resource system, resource units, governance system, and users (Ostrom, 1990, 2009). Although the notion of SESs was coined in 1970 (Ratzlaff, 1969), it was first transformed into a framework by Berkes et al. (1998) around 20 years later (Colding and Barthel, 2019). Moreover, its first application by Berkes et al. (1998) emphasised the significance of building resilience in natural resource management. Resilience is the ability to adapt, change, and reorganise while coping with disturbance and meeting shocks (Walker, 2020), and building the resilience of SESs to all kinds of disturbance and threats has become a pursuit of many plans and practices of management schemes (Biggs et al., 2015, Folke, 2016).

Thinking of the earth system as dynamic and complex(Liu et al., 2007), the SES concept has had wide influence, including in finance (e.g. attracting investment to natural capital), policy (e.g. policy design, implementation, and monitoring), governance systems (e.g. trade-offs between conservation and development) (Ostrom, 2007), and in other fields such as arts, humanities, medicine, and psychology (Colding and Barthel, 2019). Furthermore, several frameworks (Ostrom, 2007, Carpenter et al., 2009, Cumming et al., 2015, Schlüter et al., 2019) and conceptual models (Sikula et al., 2015, Nunes et al., 2019) have been developed and applied to SESs to facilitate better policy design and practical man-agement (e.g. urban planning and sustainable agriculture) (Carpenter et al., 2006, Daily and Matson, 2008, Carpenter et al., 2009, Vihervaara et al., 2010).

Further, this paper was informally reviewed by the pioneer of resilience thinking and SESs, Brian Walker (https://people.csiro.au/W/B/Brian-Walker ), before submission. He admired the draft paper and suggested some minor revisions that we incorporated.

Fourth, you only mentioned that our logic is not coherent, but you didn’t explain which part is incoherent and which part was confusing.

In a word, we welcome all critical and reasonable feedback but would need more specific advice to respond in any detail.

We understand that our previous layout may not have been the best way to show our ideas and we’ve revised it based on other reviewers’ constructive suggestions. Please check our latest manuscript. 

the title and keywords aim to address “managing” and “building landscape resilience”, but this manuscript doesn’t address manage at all, nor provide ways to build landscape resilience. 

Thanks for your feedback.

We disagree. We are discussing if building landscape resilience can be adopted as a management strategy. We’ve addressed this point at the beginning as follows:

The relationship between ecological conservation and the livelihood of people who make a living on natural resources is of crucial concern to conserving biodiversity, reduc-ing carbon emissions, achieving sustainable societies, and promoting sustainable devel-opment (Harbi et al., 2018, Hasler et al., 2019). Society’s demands on the environment are increasingly changing and diversifying, and this means that stakeholders now expect a landscape to concurrently fulfil more biophysical and sociocultural functions (Vos and Meekes, 1999, Termorshuizen and Opdam, 2009, Zari, 2018). Landscapes reflect the rela-tionship between human society and natural environment (Tudor, 2014, Solecka et al., 2018). In facing a rapidly changing world, building resilience (Bailey and Buck, 2016, Vallés-Planells et al., 2020) has been proposed to guide environmental management to deal with risks, such as the effects of climate change (Ahern, 2013, Lei et al., 2016, Cantarello et al., 2017). Building resilience can enhance a landscape’s ability to meet the needs of people, plants, animals, and microorganisms among others (Dearing, 2008, Chang et al., 2010, Allan and Bryant, 2011, Ahern, 2013, Meerow and Newell, 2019). Moreover, many scholars suggest managing landscapes for resilience to adapt, recover, or reorganise while facing disturbances (Plieninger and Bieling, 2012, Bailey and Buck, 2016, Duveneck and Scheller, 2016). ‘Although landscapes will persist in some form, it is un-likely that they will provide the same values to people or habitat for wildlife’ (Wiens, 2013: 1047), or to every person (Colloff et al., 2018). Thus, here we ask: Is building landscape re-silience an effective and just management strategy for meeting and coordinating the competing needs of different actors who are dependent on the landscape? and What are the common ‘difficulties’ that should be dealt with by applying this notion in management? 

Table1 is not a literature review, is a questions collection. None of those questions were addressed by the author.  Besides, those critiques arise from reviewing literature looks like  inexperienced in the research field.

This is an interesting point! Thanks for your comments here.

First, we agree that this is a collection of questions. We list them because they are often overlooked in management. We are not able to answer them here in just one manuscript because that’s not the aim of this paper. We list them in order to highlight their importance rather than answering them. Landscape managers in practice should answer these questions (not us) if they choose to adopt resilience thinking to instruct their management. Asking good questions is always the first step of starting to think a question comprehensively and critically.

Second, this framework (or the collection of questions) is the key to this paper because no one has summarised them all together before. It is the first time they are presented together.

Third, we don’t understand the assumption you made on “inexperienced in the research field”. Are you assuming that an experienced expert in the research field should not read and summarise literature?

I don’t see any relevance between the literature reviews and the case study.

Thanks for your feedback.

The section called “The seven difficulties framework” is the key link between the literature review and the case study. The case study is to used to test the effectiveness of the framework.

Question for methodology session: what kind of data was provided by the link in line 308? I highly question the validity of data. If you conduct interviews, what questions were included in the questionnaire? 45 people interviewed is a rather small number of sample size. Who are those interviewees? Provide a summary of questions and answer rates are the basic.

Thanks for your feedback on the methodology. This is a good question. Due to the limitation of the length of the manuscript, we chose to list the information you asked in the appendixes.

First, we listed all necessary information on the design of the interviews and data collection in the appendixes.

We undertook qualitative semi-structured interviews. This is a basic and long established method in the social sciences. The purpose of these interviews is not to have quantitative answers for statistical analysis, but rather to ascertain the range of views on a particular topic. In this kind of research, 45 is a high number of interviewees.

Thanks a lot for reminding us about the questions asked. We now added our interviewing outline in the appendixes.

For results. The conclusion that landscape resilience was changed is not sufficient at all based on interviewee’s response. The interviewee can ‘feel’ “area of forest, water resources, or wild resources have increased” .  That’s people’s perception, not a scientific conclusion unless you write about the perception landscape. 

We listed much more evidence, including satellite images, photos, datasets and documents we used in the supplementary document. You can find many numeric data in the body as well, and the data is from local archieves and documents as shown in the reference list.

Our analysis is not primarily based on interviewee’s response but an integration of many different sources of data. You can find more details in the appendixes. Interviews were conducted to capture the issues in the landscape, and then we can adopt the “issue-base” approach to identify the change of the landscape’s resilience.

Reviewer 3

The topic is interesting and there is a lot of information. However parts are particularly difficult to read as they move from one subject to the other and it often feels like a demonstration of different references. As a general comment, I would suggest consider making it a bit more focuses and clearer. I have a section by section comments' document attached

Dear Reviewer,

Thanks so much for your constructive feedback. We have revised the manuscript based on your suggestions.

The abstract provides interesting information. At the first part it gives clear

information, however the second part discusses about the 7 difficulties without giving

us indication of what this paper aims to do. 1-2 sentences with findings would make it

stronger.

Thanks a lot for your suggestion. We rewrote the second part of it as you suggested. Here it is:

We summarise current critiques and create a framework including seven normative categories, or common difficulties, namely resilience for ‘whom’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, as well as ‘can’ and ‘how’ we apply resilience normatively. We find these difficul-ties are overlooked and avoided despite their instructive roles to achieve just landscape management more transparently. Without clear targets and boundaries in building resilience, we find that some groups consume resources and services at the expense of others. The NZD case demonstrates that a strategy of building the NZD’s resilience has reduced to conserve the NZD’s ecology and overlooks trade-offs between sustaining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales.

1. Introduction

This is an interesting introduction. However, the first part is a little too heavy in

literature, and one thinks that this is just about several different concepts or theories

before it delves into the second part where the main question and aims are discussed.

The first part reads like many different ‘sentences’ and concepts where quickly

brought together.

Perhaps consider moving some of the literature to the literature section and keep the

ones you want to expand more and those who justify your research.

Thanks a lot for your feedback. We have now moved many of these concepts into the literature review section to make the introduction more concise and more focused as you suggested.

It also misses the link with the general benefits. This is meant to be published to

Sustainability, so why is this research relevant and to whom? Is it just for professionals

who deal with the landscape or can it be the public too? Present a little bit of the

impact to make it stronger.

That’s a very insightful suggestion. Thanks for that. We added several sentences as follows:

To identify potential conflicts and instruct management, these two research questions need to be asked by researchers, mangers and decision-makers before undertaking interventions that impact on landscapes resilience. A landscape cannot provide the same values to all stake-holders and prognosis of risks and challenges is also essential as identification or oppo-tunities and benefits (Dornelles et al., 2020). Considering the urgency and need to incor-porate resilience into management normatively…

2. Literature Review

Even though this section gives a lot of literature, it is written in a less clear way. Firstly

it starts by explaining what this research does, which reads like a methodology, it then

moves into literature review, but often introducing new concepts or current practices

without making the link with the scope of this research.

I would suggest moving certain parts together, eg. Systems change is mentioned in

various parts, and it is extremely important, but the link with the ‘difficulties’

examined by the paper is not clear. To a reader from a different field this might read

like a collection of different cases with no substance.

Very helpful suggestions again. Much appreciated!

We rearranged this section and added subtitles to make this section clearer. 

Also, I am not one known for sticking to traditional research structure, but if you

mention ‘methodological framework’, then it will be suggested to create a short

section after the literature to briefly discuss about it, instead of directing the reader

to the appendix.

Good point. Yes, our original layout is not very clear. We have removed the table from the appendix to the body and added a few sentences. Please check our new manuscript!

An additional comment on this section would be the date of the references. You

mention that you are using the VOSviewer (2010), and you present some earlier

references, but this is a very dynamic field, so perhaps add newer literature (2019-

2020), in this section, even though your research stops in 2018. There are many new

publications on landscape and carbon the last couple of years and as this is to be

published in 2021, it would be a loss to exclude them.

Yes, we added new publications up to 2021, as you suggested in Figure 1 and in text. Please check our next manuscript.

Figure 2 here is used to demonstrate the research trend of sustainable landscape management and connections between different topics, and we believe that the publications up to 2018 are able to show the trends.

Moreover, we cited many new publications since 2020 in the body and in the framework as well and added more as you suggested. Please check our new manuscript.

3. The seven difficulties framework

Line 169 and table. What definition do you use for resilience? And what scale to you

use for ‘building resilience’? City scale, regional scale?

This is a very important but difficult term, so perhaps a short definition of how it is

perceived by this paper would help. How is resilience in all parts of a city possible,

since there is so much diversity and how can landscape /landscape

architecture/landscape design help to achieve this?

Table 1. It seems a little strange that there is no reference/question about resilience

and sustainability or resilience/ environment and resilience and the landscape.

Especially as this is part of your core question?

Very good questions.

What scale, city scale, regional scale or global scale, to build resilience is significant but has not always been avoided and overlooked. That’s one of the reasons we want to write this paper.

That’s one of the segments under the ‘where’ category in this seven ‘difficulties’ framework to highlight its importance as you thought. The original segment is: “The unclear boundary of different scales, i.e., current-smaller-larger”. Thanks for your suggestion, we now added more explanation as “ For example, local, city-level, provincial, national or global scales.”

Yes, we agree that resilience is a very broad and difficult-to-understand phrase. That’s the reason we defined building resilience in section 2 as “The concept of building systems’ resilience is considered to be the cultivation of the systems’ capacity to recover from disruption and live with changes and uncertainties, and in doing so, challenges traditional or dominant management schemes” .

For the table, we include many references about landscape resilience and sustainability but unfortunately, most of them don’t have an obvious title clearly expressing the focus on building landscape resilience, except the one, Meerow and Newell, 2019.

Meerow, S., & Newell, J. P. (2019). Urban resilience for whom, what, when, where, and why? Urban Geography, 40(3), 309-329. doi:10.1080/02723638.2016.1206395

Meerow’s paper talked about building resilience for cities, and this paper has been cited many times in the table.

Also, Davoudi et al., 2012, Béné et al., 2012, and many other references we cited in the table extensively discuss building landscape resilience but do not use it as a title.

We also added some new and early-to-identify references into the table as you suggested.

4. An example of difficulties in building resilience: the Nuo Zha Du (NZD)

catchment landscape

Consider adding a few sentences on what the scope of this case study is.

We actually defined the scope of this case study at the end of the background section as:

This case study discusses a landscape designated by the government as the NZD reservoir catchment landscape, the area enclosed by a white line in Figure 3, which comprises lower slopes of the catchment immediately adjoining the reservoir (henceforth called the landscape). The landscape encompasses a displaced population of 46,867, spanning two municipalities, nine counties, 32 townships, 113 villages, and 597 village groups (Xu and Li, 2005).

We now separate it and make it more obvious.

4.2 This is introduced as methodology, but it is too heavy on literature review.

Revise this section and present the methodology clearer.

It should be a section on data and methods used. We restructured it and presented it more clearly as you suggested.

4.3 Line 334-335. How did it change the resilience of the landscape?

Lots of interesting quotes and findings, but it would help if the key points were

summarised in a paragraph.

5. Discussion

Lots of valuable information here, but again it becomes confusing is your read

for the first time. Perhaps create a paragraph with all the key issues and start

discussing them using the examples already presented here.

Thanks again for your constructive feedback.

First, we restructured the results section as you suggested and rewrote some sentences to clearly present a fact: decreased resilience for the social system but increased resilience for the ecological system.

Second, we removed the table that explains Figure 5 from the appendix. Yes, we quite agree with you that needs some examples to clearly summarise the main findings. Here, we believe that Figure 5 and Table 2 now do this.

6. Conclusion

Good section, but should have more about the 7 difficulties as this paper is all about

them. This can be much more impactful than just saying they can be used to identify

assumptions. What assumptions? How is this beneficial? How can this improve the

landscape resilience? What recommendations are being made by this research?

We rewrote the conclusion based on your suggestions. Here it is:

Resilience represents an ability to live, learn from, and develop with changes, some of which are unpredictable (Moritz et al., 2014, Biggs et al., 2015, Quinlan et al., 2016, Berkes, 2017). It is unavoidable that our understandings of these complexities will be incomplete as these systems are dynamic and may have unpredictable characteristics. From this per-spective, building landscape resilience could be an effective management strategy for co-ordinating the needs of different actors who are dependent on the landscape only as long as the approaches proposed or initiated by managers or researchers can enhance the landscape’s ability to coexist with changes and uncertainties justly (Knill and Tosun, 2012, Moritz et al., 2014).

However, building resilience without clear targets and boundaries has perverse im-pacts. Some groups consume resources and services at the expense of others. Seven categories of difficulties have been defined that should be dealt with when using resilience concepts to instruct management, namely resilience for whom, what, when, when, where, why, as well as can and how we apply resilience. Using the seven difficulties to question management strategies and plans can identify assumptions behind building resilience to achieve more just and sustainable outcomes more transparently. We find these difficulties are always overlooked and avoided despite their instructive roles to achieve just land-scape management. The NZD case demonstrates that a strategy of building the NZD’s resilience has reduced to conserve the NZD’s ecology and overlooks trade-offs between sustaining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales. Similar conflicts between conservation and development have also been reported by scholars like Zhang (2018) and Ding (2015) in assessing the pastoral land-scape. Future researchers, manager and decision-makers are thereby needed to think re-silience more normatively and clarify questions we summarised in the framework before approaching building landscape. In addition, undesirable resilience as highlighted by Dornelles et al. (2020) deserves more attentions to avoid blurring claims, such as building resilience of the whole system or country, and better identify trade-offs needed to cope with. 

Reviewer 4

Let me congratulate you in putting together such an interesting piece of research. A very strong methodology as well as case study analysis, discussion and conclusion. This said, the abstract, introduction and lit review could benefit from some improvements. My detail comments are as follow:

Dear Reviewer,

Thanks so much for your kind and constructive feedback.

Abstract

It is informative and provides the necessary information for the reader to understand the scope of the manuscript. However, the structure of the abstract needs some attention. A good trick is to plan your argument in 6 sentences, and then use these to structure your abstract:

1. Introduction. Describe what topic your paper covers. Provide the reader with a background to the study. Avoid unnecessary content.
2. State the problem. What is the key research question? Again, in one sentence.
3. Summarise why nobody else has adequately answered the research question yet. Emphasise the gap in the literature. You could use a phrase such as “Previous work has failed to address...”.
4. Explain how you have approached the research question. What’s your big new idea?
5. In one sentence, describe how are you planning to go about doing the research? Provide an outline of the methods you used. Did you run experiments? Carry out case studies? Design experiments? Interviews?
6. What is the key impact of your research? What conclusions did you draw or are you expecting to draw and what are the implications? What is the primary take-home message?

Thanks a lot for your constructive and very useful suggestion on constructing abstract. We rewrote it based on the guideline you provided. Here is the abstract we rewrote:

Building landscape resilience inspires the cultivation of the landscape’s capacity to recover from disruption and live with changes and uncertainties. (1) However, integrating ecosystem and society within such a unified lens—that is, social-ecological system (SES) resilience—clashes with many cornerstone concepts in social science, such as power, democracy, rights, and culture. In short, a landscape cannot provide the same values to everyone. However, can building landscape resilience be an effective and just environmental management strategy? Research on this question is limited (2-3). A scoping literature review is con-ducted first to synthesise and map landscape management change based on 111,653 records. Next, we use the Nuo Zha Du (NZD) catchment as a case study to validate our findings from the literature (4). We summarise current critiques and create a framework including seven normative categories, or common difficulties, namely resilience for ‘whom’, ‘what’, ‘when’, ‘where’, ‘why’, as well as ‘can’ and ‘how’ we apply resilience normatively. We find these difficulties are always overlooked and avoided despite their instructive roles to achieve just landscape management more transparently. Without clear targets and boundaries in building resilience, we find that some groups consume resources and services at the expense of others. The NZD case demon-strates that a strategy of building the NZD’s resilience has reduced to conserve the NZD’s ecol-ogy and overlooks trade-offs between sustaining people and the environment, and between sustainable development for people at different scales (5). Future researchers, manager and deci-sion-makers are thereby needed to think resilience more normatively and clarify questions we summarised in the framework before ap-proaching building landscape. In addition, undesirable resilience deserves more attentions to avoid blurring claims and identify trade-offs needed to cope with (6).

Introduction

Very brief and lacks on introducing clearly the problem statement that underpins this research. I’d urge the authors to revise it and to clearly contextualise the problem under investigation as well as to clearly define the aims and objectives of the study. In terms of the work cited here, it seems the authors have forgotten to refer to important work around building and landscape resilience, for instance:

Zari, MP (2018), Regenerative urban design and ecosystem biomimicry

Potangaroa, R (2010) Resourcing challenges for post-disaster housing reconstruction: a comparative analysis

Allan, P & Bryant, M (2011) Resilience as a framework for urbanism and recovery

Thanks a lot for your insightful and constructive suggestions. We’d also much appreciate the references you recommended, and they are all cited. Please check our new manuscript.

We followed your suggestion and restructured and rewrote the introduction and literature review to make it clear.

Lit Review

Well written and clearly articulated

Framework

This section summarises the key findings and articulates it in a form of a framework. It is well structured and written.

Case study

Nothing to add. The authors did an excellent work in analysing the area and relating it to the initial scope of the article.

We appreciate your kind  words for our work!

Two aspects that are worth improving: ecology – would be good to have a full overview of what are the major biophysical aspects that define the area; and, society – a clear overview of demographics, culture and societal values that are particular to this area.

First, we restructured this case study section to highlight our findings. 

Second, we added a clear overview of demographics at the end of the background section. Here it is:

This case study discusses a landscape designated by the government as the NZD reservoir catchment landscape, the area enclosed by a white line in Figure 3, which com-prises lower slopes of the catchment immediately adjoining the reservoir (henceforth called the landscape). The landscape encompasses a displaced population of 46,867, spanning across two municipalities, nine counties, 32 townships, 113 villages, and 597 village groups (Xu and Li, 2005). More than 10 indigenous ethnic minorities, including Lahu People, Yi People, Hani People, Bulan People and Wa People, live in this catchment groups and their lifestyles and livelihoods are closed connected with wild products gathering and harvesting in the NZD catchment (Xu and Li, 2005)  

Third, we added Table 3 to summarize key biophysical and social aspects of this catchment.

Please check our updated manuscript.

Thanks again for your kind suggestions.

Discussion

Very well written and on point in drawing key findings and conclusions

Conclusion

Nothing to add

Thanks a lot!