Growth Response of Red Oaks to Climatic Conditions in the Lower Mississippi Alluvial Valley: Implications for Bottomland Hardwood Restoration with a Changing Climate

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript reads well and is of satisfactorily high standard. However these few comments can improve the quality further:

1.    The abstract does not give any indication of the data collection protocols or how the data was analysed. Such information can be useful to the casual reader.

2.    The introduction is concise and justifies adequately the need for the research. The sentence on lines 62 – 64 is ambiguous. My understanding is that forest productivity is projected to decrease. But the sentence suggests that forest productivity based on tree ring analysis will decrease. I think the authors need to clarify this.

3.    The caption to Table 1 could benefit from some elaboration of the table; for example the abbreviated variables in the first column could be explained in the caption for clarity.

4.    It is intriguing that although the study is on growth rates, the results do not show any statistics on rates of growth of the various species under the specified windows / conditions. It would be instructive to provide summary statistics on the rates of growth to demonstrate more clearly the differences/similarities in growth rates under the different conditions studied to which Table 1 refers.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

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Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf