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The authors have fully addressed all the reviewers' comments.
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Ann Hedrick, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
Dear authors,
I am completely satisfied by the changes adopted by the authors of this interesting manuscript.
Dear authors,
I am completely satisfied by the changes adopted by the authors of this interesting manuscript.
Dear authors,
I am completely satisfied by the changes adopted by the authors of this interesting manuscript.
Dear editors,
I am completely satisfied by the changes adopted by the authors of this interesting manuscript.
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.
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The authors have addressed all the reviewers comments.
I have now the comments from three reviewers. All reviewers found the manuscript interesting, but they also raised some comments. Especially, reviewer 1 pointed out that the point pattern analysis and other methodological issues need to be further explained. I hope these comments will improve the manuscript going forward.
General comments
The manuscript entitled “Land-use history impacts spatial patterns and composition of woody plant species across a 35-hectare temperate forest plot” aims at evaluating the historical drivers that shaped the structure and composition of a 35 ha permanent plot temperate forest. Several researches around the world have demonstrated that 1-ha or less permanent plots are often not big enough to describe the structure and dynamics of forest stands.
This manuscript presents an impressive amount of information of fully mapped trees (> 108 thousands), but in my opinion lacks in the analyses part. I find the ms well written and I suggest transforming it in a “Data paper”. The point pattern analysis and other methodological issues need to be better explained in details.
The manuscript in its present form is a mere description of the forest inventory, without a clear ecological research question. For these reasons I suggest to reconsider the ms after minor revisions.
Specific comments
See the attached PDF “peerj-reviewing-64305-v0_rev.pdf”
The language is good, then references, structure and tables are good.
No comments.
No comments.
In this manuscript, the authors gave a good and comprehensive introduction of community composition and structure in the 35 ha Harvard Forest dynamics plot. They also assessed the intraspecific and interspecific spatial relationships of some dominated species. Especially, using good historical data in their plot, they evaluated the legacy effects of the land-use history on current species abundance and distribution, and interestingly they found land-use history showed a significant effect at a relatively local spatial scale (35 ha). In general, this manuscript has a good narrative and using appropriate methods to generate their results. I have no specific comments on this manuscript, and I think it can be accepted on this journal because very few studies has evaluated the effect on the past history events on present community structure in forest dynamics plot at a local spatial scale.
Very minor comment:
Lines 28 and 29: please use the full names of these two genera names for the first time.
Line 227: please cite the R language.
Excellent.
Good execution of sampling and analysis. Need to clarify some methodology.
Strong. Need to clarify issue with foundational species.
Land use history is a critical legacy explaining the spatial structure of tree communities and large forest dynamics plots offer the opportunity to study this at appropriate scales to infer the relevant ecological processes. This is a first look at these relationships from the Harvard Forest plot, a site that pioneered our understanding of land use effects on contemporary forests. The perspective is mostly comprehensive and offer insights into the interplay between land use, environment, and intra- and interspecific competition on the spatial structure of the forest.
The statistics are top notch and demonstrate new ways of analyzing spatial point data to address ecological questions. I have only a few concerns.
It is unclear to me how multi-stemmed individuals were handled in the point pattern analysis. Did you use all the stems and, if not, how did you choose which stem to represent the individual tree? Whatever the choice, it should be carefully justified.
Why were the most common species chosen as the top 7? Why not the 13 with >1000 stems? More? Obviously, the choice is arbitrary (other than these 7 do dominate density and BA) but can we provide more justification here?
I understand that Tsuga canadensis has been demonstrated to be a foundational species, but I wonder if you wouldn’t get a better understanding of its uniqueness in this respect if you applied the same analyses to some of the species to see if they lack the same degree of effect? Otherwise, the argument seems circular to me.
I have a few other marginal notes in the attached file. There were some typos in Table S2: check capitization of species names.
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