Comparison of Rainfall Partitioning and Estimation of the Utilisation of Available Water in a Monoculture Beech Forest and a Mixed Beech-Oak-Linden Forest

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I was presented with a very professional article for review.

The text is very interesting and informative at the same time. It brings a solid knowledge to forest ecohydrology that is extremely robust in the face of clinate changes (droughts and more intense rains).

All elements of this article are properly refined. The methodology is beyond doubt.

The best part of this manuscript is the results.

The presented results were based on funds from the national grant and really contribute a lot to the work of the authors.

In my opinion, this article can be published in the current form.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we tried to repairing or filling our manuscript according to all reviewers. And moreover, we cooperate with native speaker. These changes are highlight yellow color in the manuscript. Please, can you see on our manuscript again. We hope that now it will be better than last manuscript. 

Thank you

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The work is interesting, has a clear degree of originality, and is appropriate for publication in the journal after performing a major and very careful revision. Nevertheless, it needs some further improvements. In general, there are still some occasional grammar errors throughout the manuscript, especially the article "the," "a," and "an" are missing in many places; please make spellchecking in addition to these minor issues. The reviewer has listed some specific comments that might help the authors further enhance the manuscript's quality.
1. Specific Comments
* Overall, the Abstract section is not giving any information about methodology, results, conclusion, and recommendations as it should be with clear. I suggest the authors to remove generic lines and present the strong statements and novelty of article. The abstract written by qualitative sentences. It is need to modify and rewrite based on the most important quantity results from this research. The abstract should be redesigned. You should avoid using acronyms in the abstract and insert the work's main conclusion.
* You have used many abbreviations in the text. From this perspective, an Index of Notations and Abbreviations would be beneficial for a better understanding of the proposed work. Furthermore, please check carefully if all the abbreviations and notations considered in work are explained for the first time when they are used, even if these are considered trivial by the authors. The paper should be accessible to a wide audience. Furthermore, it will make sense to include also the notations in this index.
* The objectives should be more explicitly stated.
* The Introduction section must be written on more quality way. The research gap should be delivered on more clear way with directed necessity for the conducted research work.
* Please elaborate on the introduction section. The following literature may be helpful in this regard: << Rainfall in the Urban Area and Its Impact on Climatology and Population Growth>>, << Assessment and quantification of meteorological data for implementation of weather radar in mountainous regions>>, << Influence of meteorological drought on environmental flows in mountain catchments>>,<< An alternative to the Grain for Green Program for soil and water conservation in the upper Huaihe River basin, China >>

* What is the novelty of this work?
* It is better to improve your contributions which are not so clear to show the advantage of
your work.
* The novelty of this work must be clearly addressed and discussed in Introduction section.

* The methodology limitation should be mentioned.
Many equations are presented in the paper, and most look OK. However, please check carefully whether all equations are necessary and whether the quantities involved are properly explained. Also, some equations need references.

* Results
* This section is well written.

* Discussion
* Overall, the discussion part is weak. The Discussion should summarize the manuscript's main finding(s) in the context of the broader scientific literature and address any study limitations or results that conflict with other published work.

* Conclusion
* Some future works should be added to your conclusion.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we tried to repairing or filling our manuscript according to all reviewers. And moreover, we cooperate with native speaker. These changes are highlight yellow color in the manuscript. Please, can you see on our manuscript again. We hope that now it will be better than last manuscript. 

Thank you

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors studied the rainfall partitioning and available water utilization in a pure beech forest and a mixed broadleaf forest to figure out which forest type is more resilient to draught stress. 

In general, the manuscript is hard to understand mainly due to language issue. 

There are many errors in grammars and expressions. I suggest that the authors invite a professional to edit the English.

The Abstract is redundant. Lines 25-28 should be deleted. Abstract contains the necessity of the research, methods used, main results and findings and implication for future research or applications. 

The introduction did not present the current research status and questions to be addressed or research objectives. 

Statistics section is too simple. Please give the readers more details on how you analyze these data. List main factors and parameters. 

Results should focus on the differences between the two forest types. Temporal changes are also key parts but neglected unfortunately. 

Discussion lacks indepth analysis of your results and existing reports in terms of throughfall, stem flow, interception and transpiration. Many comparisons are superficial.

Conclusion is too long. It should not just repeat your results. It is a concise summary of results and discussions. At last, you should state how your results will benefit the future research or policy making. I recommend rejection but encourage the authors to resubmit it as new manuscripts after addressing all these issues.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we tried to repairing or filling our manuscript according to all reviewers. And moreover, we cooperate with native speaker. These changes are highlight yellow color in the manuscript. Please, can you see on our manuscript again. We hope that now it will be better than last manuscript. 

Thank you

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The study is of high interest in the present climate change context. 

Please make sure to edit some minor discrepancies in nomenclature: vegetation season (in table 2 caption) vs vegetation period (VP in table 2 header) and use of MAP and MPVS in lines 234 and 235 when actually talking about monthly precipitation instead of mean annual or season precipitation. Also consider adding information about which months that are included in the vegetation season. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we tried to repairing or filling our manuscript according to all reviewers. And moreover, we cooperate with native speaker. These changes are highlight yellow color in the manuscript. Please, can you see on our manuscript again. We hope that now it will be better than last manuscript. 

Thank you

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 5 Report

This manuscript needs significant improvements to English language and grammar, but I’ll leave that up to your editors. Technical content was quite good, and they did a nice job of bringing in past research results to compare with theirs. Their research is valuable because it ties into water use and climate change, as well as some of the problems with monoculture forest stands. 

Line 45 The abstract needs an overall conclusion statement or two.

Lines 62-71 The first time they mention the scientific name of trees, then should first list the common name. Many readers will not be familiar with the scientific names.

Line 70 – I know its called stemflow, but trees don’t have stems – they have trunks

Line 86 – this would be a good place to break for a new paragraph. The original paragraph is too long.

Line 101, Another good place for a paragraph break

Line 127 – Shouldn’t “Vegetative Season” be “Vegetative Period?”

Line 183 I don’t understand how a tree truck could be twisted around a garden hose

Figure 2 – x-axis labels for years are missing

Line 333 - this would be a good place to break for a new paragraph. The original paragraph is too long.

Line 355 - Another good place for a paragraph break

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we tried to repairing or filling our manuscript according to all reviewers. And moreover, we cooperate with native speaker. These changes are highlight yellow color in the manuscript. Please, can you see on our manuscript again. We hope that now it will be better than last manuscript. 

Thank you

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Accept.

Author Response

Dear editor, 

our article went through two rounds of revision. In the first round, we tried to correct and supplement the article according to the suggestions of reviewers. Suggestions covered all passages of the article. According to results of the second round of revision, our correction of the article was done in almost full-fledged. Three reviewers having no objections. One reviewer wanted minor adjustments in the English language and one reviewer saw a big improvement (compared to last time), but still his requirements were not met. 

This reviewer suggested extensive editing of the text due to its length and unnecessary information, especially in the introduction, discussion, and conclusion, which we tried to do thoroughly (we removed a total of 80 lines of text and 30 citations that were not important to the article). We also raised questions and justified the conduct of this research, which was lacking. And finally we had the English language checked and corrected. 

Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Compared with previous version, great improvements in English, Figures and organization have been made. However, the authors have not fully addressed my previous concerns. English still does not meet the standards of publication. Too much tedious sentences. In general, extensive editing is required. The introduction has not presented the latest research development in this field. The first two paragraphs are not closely relevant to the current research. It should be condensed into two to three sentences. The questions raised are not important. Difference between monoculture and mixed forests are obvious. The authors should point out that which parts have not been fully understood. In Introduction, the authors should justify necessity of doing this research. Results and Discussion contains many unnecessary information. The conclusion is too long. Three to five sentences are fine. 

Author Response

Dear editor, 

our article went through two rounds of revision. In the first round, we tried to correct and supplement the article according to the suggestions of reviewers. Suggestions covered all passages of the article. According to results of the second round of revision, our correction of the article was done in almost full-fledged. Three reviewers having no objections. One reviewer wanted minor adjustments in the English language and one reviewer saw a big improvement (compared to last time), but still his requirements were not met. 

This reviewer suggested extensive editing of the text due to its length and unnecessary information, especially in the introduction, discussion, and conclusion, which we tried to do thoroughly (we removed a total of 80 lines of text and 30 citations that were not important to the article). We also raised questions and justified the conduct of this research, which was lacking. And finally we had the English language checked and corrected. 

Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.docx