Impact of Land Use Change and Afforestation on Soil Properties in a Mediterranean Mountain Area of Central Spain

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Please find attached my comments

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We attach point-by-point response letter

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The review of manuscript "Infiltrability before the changes of land use and afforestation in a Mediterranean mountain area of Central Spain" (Manuscript ID: land-1777784).

 The authors assessed the impact of land use change and afforestation on soil properties. The subject addressed in this paper is worthy of investigation. The paper adds new information to the subject and could be published in Land after some modifications. My recommendation is MINOR REVISIONS.

The following are suggestions for revising the manuscript:

Line 2: „Infiltrability before the changes of land use and afforestation” should be changed to „Impact of land use change and afforestation on soil properties”.

Lines 13–14: „We measured soil infiltration rates, soil repellency, and physical and chemical soil properties” should be changed to „We measured infiltration rates, soil water repellency, and physical and chemical properties of sandy loam soils”.

Lines 38–39: In my opinion, infiltration is not difficult and expensive to measure and this is not claimed by Mao et al. [12].

Lines 44–46, 47: The authors should explain the difference between „infiltrability” and „infiltration capacity”.

Lines 75, 76 and 116: The authors should explain whether „improve” means „increase” or „decrease” the soil properties.

Lines 163–165: To complete the description of soils studied, the authors should add sand/silt/clay contents, as well as C_org and CaCO₃ contents.

Lines 196–204: As citation [111] (Mongil, J.; Navarro, J.; Díaz, V.; Cruz, V. New flood infiltrometer for economic infiltration test in agroforestry lands and green spaces. Cuad. de Investig. Geogr. 2015, 41, 281-290.) does not exist (cf. https://publicaciones.unirioja.es/ojs/index.php/cig/issue/view/182), the authors should add a photo of the simple ring infiltrometer (Infiltest) with the little furrow surrounding the simple ring.

Line 208–216: The authors should present for MED test, where they found the threshold value of the ethanol drop infiltration time of 3 s. The cited papers [85, 89, 112] do not present this value. The paper [85] (Ceballos, A.; Martínez-Fernández, J.; Santos, F.; Alonso, P. Soil-water behaviour of sandy soils under semi-arid conditions in the Duero Basin (Spain). J. Arid Environ. 2002, 51, 501-519. https://doi.org/10.1006/jare.2002.0973) does not deal with the WDPT and MED tests at all and should be deleted from Line 209.

Line 210: The authors should present how many drops of distilled water they let penetrate in each WDPT test.

Lines 220, 221, 222, 276, 279, 282, 324, 360, 466, 470, 473, 476, 478, 566, 574, and 575: The authors should remove the hyphen in the words parti-cles,  extract-ed, con-tent, infiltra-tion, repel-lency, posi-tively, prob-ability, ca-pacity, ap-pearance, au-thors, for-est, an-other, veg-etation, fi-nally, in-dicate, abstrac-tion, respectively.

Line 288: „explained” should be changed to „are explained”.

Line 466: „Bisdon” should be changed to „Bisdom”.

Line 472: „CaCO3” should be changed to „CaCO₃”.

Author Response

We attach point-by-point response letter

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

authors have responded to the majority of required changes, no further corrections are required

Author Response