Historic and Contemporary Gardens: A Humanistic Approach to Evaluate Their Role in Enhancing Cultural, Natural and Social Heritage

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1)The keywords do not match the title and abstract of this article.

2)Ecosystem services, as mentioned in the last paragraph of Introduction, are not scientifically well interpreted in the following parts.

3)It is not clear that if there were strong relationship between several definitions such as the urban green areas, landscape system, environmental justice etc. in different parts of this article. It is also not clear between the main body and the intended meaning.

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the feedback. Here are our notes to each of the three suggestions:

1) The keywords have been adapted to the title and the abstract, which has been slightly modified.

2) We modified the last paragraph of the introduction of our communication (which has a humanistic approach) by specifying which ecosystem services we mainly focus on, e.g. the cultural ones. In the introduction, we also added a couple of references (15 and 16) to better define what is commonly meant by cultural ecosystem services. This is intended to better address the following parts

3) As "green areas" we mainly refer to parks and gardens. We tried to make this relation more clear. The intended meaning was to highlight the importance (and maintenance/implementation) of historical/contemporary parks and gardens, which provide fundamental ecosystem services, including the cultural ones. The final aim is to improve human well-being, which is closely related to the possibility to take advantage of these green areas also in a city context. We tried to stress that this possibility has not to be related to income and richness and must be accessible to everyone (in the framework of "environmental justice")

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper does not have a strong research question other than the discussion of the value of preserving historic gardens and this discussion is not strongly argued. There is no method suggested, not even around the choice of literature sources, and while the content is relevant and important it reads as the first chapter or introduction to a thesis rather than the summary findings of that thesis. The academic contribution to the field is not clear.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2

We take note that the reviewer did not appreciate the paper, which is a "communication" (not a scientific article). The communication was aimed at emphasising the importance of urban green areas (in particular historic and contemporary parks and gardens) for the ecosystem services, especially cultural ones, they provide to people, and which should be accessible to everyone, regardless of social status and wealth. The interest of cultural ecosystem services is sometimes forgotten and, with a humanistic approach (which deserves to be taken into consideration within a multidisciplinary context) the communication wishes to underline (from different points of view) how important is to preserve and implement parks and gardens for people well being. The literature was selected with this purpose. We observe that, in spite of the criticism arosen about literature choice, the only positive feedback, in the short report, was about the relevance of the cited references to the text.

We appreciate that, however, the reviewer found the content relevant and important. We wish to point out that the communication was not supposed to be either a thesis introduction or a summary.

Following the reviewer's advice, we had the English of the final version professionally revised

Reviewer 3 Report

The essay's theme is original and interesting as it proposes a new way of dealing with history and functions of the gardens. The paper can be accepted without any further modifications. The only advice, but not mandatory, could be to add some proposals on future planning and on the possible methods, measures and tools to be used.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 3

We thank the reviewer for the positive feedback. Following his/her advice, in the conclusions we added a paragraph (with the relevant references, i.e., 29 and 30) in which we propose to include urban and peri-urban agriculture and urban gardening in planning programs of green management and as tools to be used.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The edits have improved the paper.