Biodiversity Conservation of National Parks and Nature-Protected Areas in West Africa: The Case of Kainji National Park, Nigeria

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have responded to all my comments. I have no more comments on the paper.

Author Response

Please find attached below the response to the reviewer's comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments to the author

Authors addressed all the reviewer comments but still contains some grammatical and typo errors so please carefully revised entire manuscript.

1.      The figure 3, 4 and 5 is not clear so please replace with good quality of images.

2.      Please check back all the reference format

Author Response

Please find attached below the response to the second reviewer's comments.

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

Comment to Author

The manuscript title is Biodiversity Conservation of National Parks and Na-2 ture-Protected Areas in West Africa: The Case of Kainji Na-3 tional Park, Nigeria, by  Adesina John and Tang Xiaolan.  The study covers the main flora and wildlife in the 22 studied areas. The 15 trees discovered were picked at random within a stratum of 10x10 km and divided into 24 plots for adequate analysed. Photosynthetically Active Radiation, Rain/Precipitation, Temperature, Transpiration, Evaporation, Water Intercepted by Trees, Avoided Runoff by Trees, Potential Evaporation 26 by Trees, Isoprene and Monoterpene by Trees were all captured and studied. The overall paper was very well represented. An interesting article, with the necessary information is given and the manuscript is well-written. I appreciate the efforts of the authors in gathering and presenting the information in an easily understandable manner. Whatever the literature provided by the author can be published after minor revision. The back references are not appropriately arranged according to the journals so please take care and revise it. In this manuscript contains some typo errors so please double check before revision submits.

Reviewer 2 Report

The research is interesting, but the manuscript needs a substantial clarification of objectives and re-structuralization. With the below suggested revision, I feel the manuscript will represent a valuable publication.

As novel results and analysis connect to tree species and their microclimatic effects, I suggest focusing on this topic. The relations between tree species and the fauna of the study site or between land use and diversity aspects are not analyzed; these sessions should be strongly shortened and mentioned in the description of the study area only.
The introduction session is too general. Maybe one or two sentences about policy issues could describe the current legal state and processes of nature protection. The rest of the introduction should be a well-focused literature review.  
The materials and methods session should not contain results. One map is enough to locate the study area; other national parks are irrelevant in this manuscript.
If presenting land use, land cover changes of the area is an aim of the article, Landsat imageries should be analyzed correctly. If not, this issue should also be shortened and moved to the description of the study site.
Session data collection should be clarified: present only the measured data (e.g., tree species, age, height, etc.) and the method here. Data collected from the literature should be separately mentioned.
Table 3 does not contain biodiversity data: the number of trees and their cover is not biodiversity.
Session "results and discussion" fails to compare findings with literature data, and the results do not show how they support biodiversity. Consider dropping this objective and concentrating on climatic issues only. The presented results involve interesting microclimatic data, but needs further analysis, eg. if tree species or abundance or growth parameters affect the results, or a comparison with a less woody area should be investigated.
Formal mistakes:

Correct species scientific names to italicized, and capitalize only the genus name.

„Biodiversity Conservation” and “Kainji National Park” are already included in the title, so they can be removed from the keywords.

The form of references is not uniform and does not follow the formal requirements of the journal.

Language would benefit from the attention of a native English speaker.

Reviewer 3 Report

Conservation of the biodiversity of natural ecosystems is extremely important due to the increasing human impact and climatic changes. In this regard, the topic of the paper is relevant.

The relevance of the research is perfectly justified. However, the state of the problem is described unsatisfactorily. The authors cite only general words. Information on specific studies of biodiversity in the national park under study is completely absent. It needs to be fixed.

The purpose and objectives are not formulated. It needs to be fixed.

The research area is described acceptably.

Tables 1-3 refer to the research results and should be placed in the appropriate section.

The research results are written very poorly. It's more like a discussion with an obscure meaning. It should be noted that the entire text is hard to read. I reread the sentences several times to understand the meaning. Therefore, it is not interesting to read the paper and I made a lot of effort to finish reading to the end.

Figures 8-12 are uninformative. The text explains little about them.

I don't understand why a section "Air Pollution Removal by Urban Trees " is needed in this paper and what it has to do with the authors' research.

The conclusion should be rewritten in accordance with the conducted research. The authors should clearly formulate the purpose and objectives of the research. This will help you write a conclusion and formulate conclusions.

The abstract should be rewritten. The authors have paid too much attention to the relevance of research and very little attention to the results and conclusions.