Species-Abundance Models for the Early Postfire Succession of Subalpine Shrub Grassland

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 Species Abundance Models for Early Postfire Succession of  Subalpine Shrub-Grassland

[Fire] Manuscript ID: fire-2732350

Comments to the authors

General comments

I reviewed with great interest the manuscript entitled “Species Abundance Models for Early Postfire Succession of Subalpine Shrub-Grassland ” submitted to the journal Fire.

The topic, and, as a whole, the findings are interesting. The text is well-structured and easy to understand, though some sentences and paragraphs should be moved from where they are reported to other sections.

On the other hand, I believe that including a close unburned plot (as a control) in the analyses would substantially improve the quality of this study. For instance, this would be the best way to confirm you first conclusion, in which you state that “Five years after the fire incident, the status of shrub-grassland near 369 Hut at Xue Mountain gradually approached stability.”

Specific comments are reported in the manuscript (pdf).

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Minor editing of English language required.

Author Response

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper proposal studies the postfire floristic succession in a Subalpine shrub-grassland in the at Xue Mountain (Taiwan) using different species Abundance Models. The final objective is to obtain detailed insights into habitats during post-disturbance restoration processes during the first five years. The paper is based on a systematic sampling conducted in the field on the postfire area of the shrub-grassland. The starting reference is a fire incident from 18 December 2018. Data obtained are analyzed in terms of species diversity, distribution, and coverage during postfire succession. Different periods of postfire data were simulated using the five species abundance models. In summary, the results show that five years after the fire event, the status of shrub-grassland at Xue Mountain gradually approached stability. In general, species abundance models provided good interpretations for collected data and for the ecological processes and current statuses of the vegetation. However, fitting results for each species abundance model showed that the Zipf–Mandelbrot model and the log-normal model provided optimal results for most of the restoration process.

The paper contains a large amount of data, both raw, but also processed to offer analytical information well rendered by a rich illustration. The cited literature is also quite substantial, at least quantitatively. Thanks to the systematic monitoring and the models used, the vegetation recovery processes, in the case studied, are very well described, and explained. However, in its current form the paper still deserves some improvement. The reviewer is not an expert in the different models used and will not judge the relevance of their implementation here and trusts the authors. But given our knowledge of the impacts of fires in numerous ecological contexts and of vegetation resilience processes, we can raise a certain number of questions here.

In terms of his form, there are no major comments to make. The construction is logical, the data and results are well presented and the figures all useful. It would be useful to add a scale to the images in fig.2. The bibliography is formally well presented but needs to be completed (see below).

As a non-native English speaker, the reviewer cannot judge the level of language.

This paper offers a very interesting case study on the natural restoration capacity of vegetation after disturbance. But for a paper proposed to Fire, the role of fire should be put back at the center of the problem. Its publication must also have a more general interest than just the case study.

Authors must therefore better explain the role of fire in this environmental and bioclimatic context. According to the climate diagram in Fig.1, even if the month of December is the least rainy, there is no dry month in the year. We therefore do not understand how fire can circulate in this type of vegetation, if the authors do not explain what the combustible biomass is. Also, how frequent are fires in this environment? Is this fire an exceptional accident or is there a regular return of fires? At what time frame? You also need to better characterize the nature of this incident, perhaps in the “Materials and Methods” section. We must wait until l. 254 to learn that the fire event was a “low-intensity surface fires”! Some of this information is given only at the beginning of the discussion: “Due to the occurrence of fire during the winter season […] the harm caused to the majority of the plant compositions was minimal”. However, this information is useful from the start to understand the results (3.1, 3.2, fig.3, Table 1 & 2).

The authors here rely on a single fire event and discuss vegetation restoration after disturbance. Despite validation by several models, can we still rely on this study in other contexts? The discussion must therefore better compare the results to the international literature specific to postfire succession in Subalpine vegetation. This literature is insufficiently considered in the paper (refs 1,2,3 only in the introduction). This discussion is important to validate the statement in l.348: “Our results showed that the subalpine shrub-grasslands in Taiwan comprised fire-dependent vegetation” or other statements in the Conclusion.

Finally, the conclusion must be strengthened by taking into account all these elements to further highlight the role of fire.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf