Peter Rockermann
This paper will describe the vegetation in five sites on each of five rivers in New York State, with
attention to ash because of its susceptibility to the emerald ash borer.
General comments
I gather that the Results section is not complete. I hope you will have figures that illustrate your
primary findings.
Use terms consistently to describe your sampling design. You use “river,” “plot,” “stand,” and
“site.”
The experimental design needs to be clearly identified. It would be easy to use plots for the
experimental unit, but incorrect, because they are not independent samples. Your experimental
unit should be the river, right?
You decided not to use common names for trees, but for the emerald ash borer? I appreciate
common names. You could look at other papers in your target journal to judge what your
audience expects.
Table 1 currently doesn’t provide information of interest to your readers. The individual plot
locations should be archived with your major professor or research sponsor, but your readers
don’t care. The site designations are not useful to us. It could be useful to have a table that
described the characteristics of the sites that are important to interpreting your results.
Specific comments
You don’t have page numbers and the line numbers aren’t unique! I’m going to cite line numbers
and let you figure out what page these comments are on (they are probably mostly
chronological).
3 This would be a good place to describe the geographic regions and what’s different about
them. If it’s not important, maybe you don’t need to mention it. The list of the names of the
rivers and the part of the state they are in doesn’t do much for me. If you have predictions of
how things would be different in the different rivers based on their locations, this might even be
worthy of moving to your Introduction.
6-10 This is a long sentence and any kind of numbering system is usually a sign that your
sentence couldn’t hold up under its own weight. In this case, it seems like it might be reasonable
to enumerate your criteria, except that I bet it’s not really important that there are four of them.
The parts are not parallel in structure. You could make them parallel, and it would still be
horrendously long. If you make short sentences, it won’t matter if they differ in structure.
23 Do you need to use an alpha or can you just report your P values?
“dominant” in forests can refer to canopy position. Is “common” better?
You give three significant digits in your results, but I bet the last one is not meaningful. This will
be more clear when you have s.e. or CIs.
You give 5 decimal places in your lat and long, which looked like way too much to me, so I
looked it up. “A value in decimal degrees to an accuracy of 4 decimal places is accurate to 11.1
meters.” (For longitude, it must depend on the latitude, but close enough.) Your sites are bigger
than that. So even 4 decimal places is probably too much. If you want to archive the locations of
all your plot corners, fine, but your readers don’t need that.
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
It would have been good to include your figure for review (the map).
7 I’m not sure we need to know
10 I bet you mean “plot”. If not, define what a site is.
Actually, I bet “river” is not right in line 3. You didn’t consider the entire length of the river, I
bet. Maybe “site” would be the right term for each of the places you chose to put sites, one per
river.
10 What’s a “stand” relative to plot, site, and river? Same question.
13 You can’t start a sentence with an abbreviation.
Jim Arrigoni
This paper describes the development of a biological index for monitoring water quality in
streams in Hong Kong. Tolerance values are assigned to invetebrate taxa by family. The
numbers of invertebrates are
General comments
The paper is long and there are a lot of steps to explain. I was going to suggest that section
headings would help. But I think I will make an exception and suggest that you depart from the
IMRD format, and use section headings that allow you to write a more naturally organized
narrative.
Specific comments
4 I can’t believe you eliminated 55 of the 82 stations and used all that were satisfactory. If so,
maybe you should list your criteria. I would believe you if you said you picked 27 and gave the
criteria for your selection. I think “inappropriate” sometimes is a way to evade responsibility for
defining what’s desirable.
48 An alternative is to assign the detection limit. I think I’ve also seen half the detection limit.
49 The metric you developed. It shouldn’t take me part way through the sentence to know you
aren’t talking about someone else’s metric.
The verb tense switches back and forth between past and present in the Results. I suggest past
tense throughout (even though some statements may still be true; you don’t know that without
going back!)
97 I lost track. Are we still working with the PCA Axis 1 scores? So, you didn’t worry about
breaks in the distribution, but your classes 1 through 5 are distinguished along this axis? The
narrative is hard to follow because it’s so long.
105 This sounds like a different topic. The first sentence of the paragraph says you calculated the
HKMI, but here you are talking about an assessment of the index. I
Table 1 is an alphabetical list that mixes a lot of categories together. Would a good way to
organize them be by analytical methods? I object to the three columns because they are not
meaningful, and the rows are not meaningful.
Table 2 is important. How are the entries ordered, taxonomically?
Table 3: I couldn’t understand the table heading, there is a “between” followed by two “and”s. I
thought maybe the ASPT was being compared to each of the HKMIs, but that’s definitely not
what the sentence says. Is it important to include the P values, when all of them are so small?
Table 4 has 8 values, did we say 6 was minimal? Do you think all those digits are significant?
CVs are often reported in units of %, which would get you down to 1 digitand be easier to read.
Are the differences important? Oh, you wanted to say that the dry season was better than the
wet season? They don’t look that different to me.
Figure 1 caption doesn’t say 27 streams, your other captions do.
The Figure 1 variables could be identified in Table 1.
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
2 Good example of a problematic noun train. It sounds fine, but I can’t figure out how you
should hyphenate it. If “streamwater” were one word, you’d be in business. I bet you can pick
some words to drop out. Water quality appears later in the sentence.
This sentence is a mouthful. It won’t matter so much when it’s buried in the Methods; it’s not
really your opening sentence.
22 verb tense change
25 comma in a list of two items
30 three visits occurred: passive is strange here, like they just happened to occur. “We
scheduled” would show intent.
The following paragraph is awkward without an agent. “after carefully washing” is a dangling
modifier because you have no actor in the sentence.
41 suggests that those without large numbers were not sorted completely
Sorting is different from counting? I don’t get it.
Figure 2: How about a dashed line for 1:1? Oh, you need it to be consistent with Figure 3.
Figure 3 is not consistent in format (font size) with Figure 2.
Angela Sirois
This paper describes the population dynamics of a threatened bog turtle in two sites in western
Massachusetts. The two sites provide a contrast, as one is actively managed for turtle
conservation and the other is not. Specifically, the managed sites have a greater variety of habitat
types. I think the point of the study is to see whether managing for these habitat alterations pays
off in turtle population growth. Maybe it would be good to pick a different question if this is not
one you can answer.
General comments
The study is impressive for the long record of sampling. It seems a shame to exclude data from
before 1995 and 1997-2005, if you have it. I’m looking at Figure 1 and wondering whether I
would have a completely different impression if all the years were represented (I know this can
happen with sampling forest floor mass, for example). Wouldn’t there just be larger or smaller
error bars with lesser or greater sampling effort? We could see variation in the mean and also
how much store to put by the changes over time.
The Results section has one subsection headed “Demography” and no other subsections. The
results seem short (about 1 page) compared to the 5 pages of methods! So I’m guessing that there
is more to come. If the focus of the paper is on habitat alternation, then I would expect there to be
tables or figures showing me the success of turtles in different habitat types. The other thing
your abstract highlighted was the comparison of pre-treatment to post-treatment observations. I
didn’t notice these in your results.
The number of tables and figures seems excessive. Here are some suggestions for reducing them.
Tables 7, 10, and 13 present details of lots of models. I think the point was to find what variables
best explained the observations. Is there more we need to know than what the best model was? I
think I’d get more out of a paragraph of text and it would take less space than these tables. You
could tell us what variables were tested and how much better the best model was than some of
the other good models. I’m not sure it’s important to show us the details of the statistics for all
the models.
I suggest combining Figures 1, 2, and 3 into panels of a single figure sharing an x axis that is
quantitative for time. As above, I’d also like to see the data filled in for the dates where they are
available, even if the design is not consistent.
Specific comments
38, 30 The first sites is a calcareous wetland, I don’t know why I expected the second site to be
different. Could you give the features they have in common before you go on to the specifics?
p. 5 You should give references for these various tests. Not the statistical package, but the source
for the method. I think you can reduce the number of acronymns, I bet these are not all
recognized by your target audience. Some of them you introduce multiple times and some you
don’t use consistently, which is probably a vote for not using them. See p. 6.
105-107 Is it important which way you coded it? I think you would report the same statistics
either way. Similarly, we don’t need to know the units for your variables (e.g. 135); the
significance of your tests does not depend on the units. We do need to know them when you
display results.
100, 113 When you say data were pooled for both sites, in the first case I think you meant
separately by site and in the second case you mean together. Make the language more distinct if
these in fact mean different things.
123-126 This material looks like it belongs in the section where you catch and measure turtles,
not where you analyze your data.
126-128 and 135-138 There is probably a way to organize your description so you don’t have to
repeat this for both tests.
Tables and figures have to be numbered sequentially starting at 1.
Why are you reporting trapping hours instead of days, if it doesn’t add resolution? The number
of days would be easier to read.
I don’t want to learn M and U, you can write them out.
What does the s stand for in Table 2?
Tables 1 and 2 would be more concise if the 2 years were set as different rows instead of in
different columns.
Table 4 could be organized to first show the habitat types common to both sites and then the ones
found only at the managed site. This would save the column for M & U and make it easier to get
the description for a site. If the types are organized in an important order, you should ignore this
suggestion. Capitalization should be consistent.
Table 5 seems like something you need for completeness rather than something the readers will
care about, so are the two lines for totals worth the space they take? If you want readers to see a
pattern, a figure would be better.
Table 6: Total captures includes radio-tagged turtles: I was confused. This suggests that the
other counts do not? Without the footnote, I thought total captures meant that the same turtle
can be counted multiple times, compared to the total number of turtles.
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
47 subjected, I think, but it’s not a great verb. “Burned” is a great verb, but I appreciate the need
to distinguish controlled burning from wildfires.
48 Notable? Or someone noted them?
58-49 We don’t need to know what you were doing when you weren’t surveying. Here, I think
we need the intensity of surveying activity. Tell us about the other activities elsewhere, if
relevant.
65 If you have a comma in an item in your list, you need semicolons to separate the items. Maybe
you can find a better solution (split into more sentences).
67, 68 Sex and age are described later (so you can omit them here). Health conditions sounds
vague.
74 all turtles? How many?
108 Is this necessary?
109 I’m pretty sure this is not necessary.
142 “within 23 years” of what? “Over a 25-yr period” was better.
Is the number of turtles “captured and marked” different from the number captured or the
number marked? If all the ones captured were marked, then “observed” or “studied” would
work.
146 seems like the parenthetical comment should refer to the sites. Maybe you don’t want this
sentence at all; it’s methods, right?
153 Rather than say that the variable was not important, you could say that males and females
were captured at similar rates.
Are rho and phi conventional symbols for capture and survival? If not, don’t introduce new
symbols. Actually, I’m not sure about showing this table.
Table 8. If you showed us the coefficients, it would matter what you dummy variables were,
right? But since you don’t, we don’t care.
Anna Harrison
This paper describes the use of sites by beavers in an area of the Adirondacks where beaver
lodges have been monitored for 30 years. The current study characterized 14 sites to see which
factors best explained the frequency of use by beavers. I’m not an expert in this field, but the
study seems novel and likely to be useful.
General comments
It seems like a major gap to have no information on the numbers of beavers. Maybe this topic
will be addressed in your Introduction and Discussion. Still, in the Results, it is important to
define what you mean by “occupancy.” It’s the fraction of years in which a site was occupied,
and it doesn’t reflect whether there were a lot or only a few beavers. If “occupancy” is not a term
that is well known to your audience to mean the frequency of occupation, maybe you could come
up with a better term.
It’s important that you characterize the landscape only at the end of the 30-year period. You need
to provide the dates for your field measurements, and make clear that they do not cover the same
period as the occupancy data. Again, this will probably be more clear in the Introduction and the
Discussion, but the reader who starts with your Results also needs to understand your study.
Is there any difficulty in determining what a site it? It has one lodge? If a big site could have
been considered to be two little sites, this would clearly affect the probability of occupancy.
I’m not crazy about “drivers” of beaver occupancy: it suggests causality. What you have are
correlations. You could use the word “predictors” which has a well defined meaning in
statistical models.
The distinction between stream sites and other sites is important in the Results but is not
described in the Methods. What is a stream site? Does it have no ponds? No, there are no sites
in Table 1 with 0 ponds. There is a sentence about natural wetlands (l. 150), which I didn’t
understand. The experimental design should be clearly explained in the Methods.
The Results as written seem to be about the statistics rather than about your subject matter. Can
you write sentences about the beavers and the landscapes, citing the statistical models?
I don’t understand the purpose of presenting so many models. It reminds me of stepwise
regression, but there a single analysis can be used to judge which variables are important to
include. Do you expect all of these models to be used, or is it a matter of presenting the evidence
that the best one is the best?
You have material in the Results about application of your research, which will be good for the
Discussion session.
Specific comments
27 I don’t think we care about the extent of the HWF unless it coincides with your research area.
You should cite sources for the information describing the climate and vegetation at HWF.
I don’t think AEC is an acronym worth learning. I’m not even sure about HWF.
I think you could probably cut back on the detail in the description of your landscape mapping
and dam volume. Wouldn’t another researcher duplicate your results even if you didn’t give any
of these details? Maybe one sentence about the spatial resolution would be useful (I’m
calculating what 0.01 ha comes to, because I think it’s less than the resolution of your mapping,
see Table 1). Also, I don’t think you need to show us the formula for the area of a triangle.
I’m trying to think what most papers say about how the slope was obtained. Maybe they don’t
say it. Do you think the reader needs to know this to interpret your slopes?
77-82 If transects are a highly unusual way to collect this kind of data, then maybe you have to
justify your choice. I don’t think anyone will complain if you just tell us about your transects.
83-88 I think this could be one sentence, tell us that the 5-m wide transects ran perpendicular to
the pond edge from the pond to 10 m past the foraging area, and that the number of transects
was selected to sample 2% of the foraging area.
89-96 This can also be reduced. The important information here are the exclusion criteria and the
measurements you took.
102 If you measured the volume of each dam, the effort should be the sum of the volumes.
Multiplying the number times the volume suggests that you used a common volume for all the
dams. Is that what you did?
125 I believe you should transform your variables if warranted by examination of your residuals;
this is not what you said.
127 Where can I see this result? You can say “results not shown”
124-132 Methods
139-143, 154-155 These are not results, maybe you want them for your discussion of application
of your results?
Tables 2 and 3 could be combined. I find the variable names daunting. It would be easier to
understand “ln(PondArea)” than “PondAln”, what’s “Aln”? Maybe the variables should be in a
table. I think just adding more letters will help (Area rather than A).
Figure 1 looks good, even in black and white. Is it even better in color? You can probably have
color for free as long as you don’t care about reprints.
Figure 2: You could put the equations and statistics in the figures, and then we would have to
learn what HWBA etc stand for (PO is percent occupancy? I think we said we would like units of
percent for occupancy!)
“Total” is confusing, because it sometimes means live and dead (am I correct that this is the
difference between A and B?) and sometimes it means hardwoods plus softwoods (B vs. C). By
the way, A, B, and C are not explained. So that might be your chance to explain the totals.
Maybe “Live and Dead” and “Hardwood and Softwood” would be better.
Figure 3: I’m trying to figure out the difference between the filled and open circles, but I think
they are the same. In Figure 4 they mean something different. You should try to use the same
symbols to mean the same thing across different figures.
What is the purpose of showing both log and linear regression lines? Maybe you should show
the one you think is better and that you want people to use.
Give exact P values down to some minimum, below which you can use “<”. I didn’t object to “P
< 0.001” as this is a common minimum. Do not use alpha with less than; alpha is a cutoff for
significance (which I don’t advocate; giving P is better).
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
41 just describe how a cache was recognized. This sentence stands out as not part of your
methods.
118 It would be better to say 1 year to all years, 3% suggests higher precision than 1/30.
150 make sure the occupation of sites doesn’t stand out as the contrast, it’s whether or not they’re
on a stream, right?
Rakesh Yasaria
This paper describes the precipitation of lignin and lignin-derived compounds from wood
extracts using a variety of flocculating agents. The question is important because of the potential
to use wood as a source of liquid biofuels.
General comments
I will understand your paper better after I see the Introduction. I think, from your abstract, that
we are not interested in the flocculated material, but rather the sugars that remain in solution,
from the point of view of biofuel feedstocks. If so, then I would think readers would be
interested in whether the flocculation process leaves the sugars in solution.
If I understand Table 1 correctly, it doesn’t seem necessary; it could be explained in a sentence or
two. The first column gives the controls without the flocculants? If so, the variation is not
meaningful except to indicate the experimental variability, which could be described with a mean
and standard error. Then all but one of the flocculants gave diameters higher than the detection
limit of your system. It doesn’t add any information to say that each one is >3000 (and I bet you
don’t need that final 0.0). In contrast, the very small concentration of alum had no effect. Did
you show us this table in class? It would have been a good one to discuss!
You have two figures for each of your flocculants. I think it would be easier to understand the
figures if you combined them, so there are not eight independent figures to figure out (they look
rather similar). At first I thought you should combine the turbidity and zeta potential graphs for
each flocculant, since this is the order in which you refer to them. But I think the best for your
readers would be to make all the turbidity graphs into one graph (with four stacked panels, no
space between the panels, as they all share the x axis) and one graph for the zeta potential,
stacked in the same order. Each of the panels would be labeled with the flocculant.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to fit curves through your points. They suggest that you know
where the inflection points are, where you have no observations. It would be safe to use straight
lines. We talked about this in class.
I didn’t understand why the points were connected in the figures for turbidity but not for zeta
potential. Consistency is good. And it makes them easier to read. I see in Figure 6 that the
values bounce around—this is why you don’t want to fit curves!
Because you don’t describe your results, I don’t know what is important in this paper. What do
you want us to compare? This could influence how you organize the figures.
Specific comments
Line numbers would be helpful.
2 You say two hours, but in the next line you say that you varied the extraction time.
4 You say that you determined the mass removal from the chips, but if this is not reported in
your paper, you probably shouldn’t include it in the methods. I think maybe you should include
it in the results.
The organization of the methods might be easier to understand if you used paragraph breaks.
I wonder if there could be a better organization of the methods. 4-9 you describe how you
measured particle size and turbidity. Then you describe the flocculants. Then you say that you
measured particle size and turbidity. No, you say turbidity and particle size. Keeping things in
the same order will be helpful, too.
If you did the experiments more than once, you would say so?
The results section conveys very little information, it’s exactly like the example of what not to do,
in the handout from Steve Stehman. You should tell us what to see in the figures, not describe
the axes. For example, say, “Alum precipitated the wood solids in concentrations of 0.1 M and
0.25 M but not 0.01 M (Figure 1).” You could say, “The time required for the turbidity to be
reduced to y was x minutes at 0.01 M and xx minutes at 0.25 M.” Is the time difference
important? I don’t know what is important in the results because you didn’t describe them.
I would find it easier to read the graphs if the legend were in the figure instead of in the caption.
I think we talked about this in class.
Laura Schifman
This paper describes water stress in four willow varieties at three sites in central New York, using
carbon isotopes in wood.
General comments
I didn’t understand the purpose of the study. I hope it will be more clear when I see your
Introduction. Maybe I would be better off if I didn’t hear you last year say that the point was to
evaluate water use, for purposes of phytoremediation. This topic is not addressed. So, why
would we care about water stress? Is there some relationship between that and productivity? If
a variety grows faster and shows more stress, that would still be a good variety to plant. I also
didn’t understand the purpose of the three sites. It would be good to have enough clues as to the
meaning that a reader could start with the Results and still get the point of your paper.
The results are reported on a plant basis. But in willow biomass plantations, we’re interested in
stand-level productivity. I wonder whether it would be interesting to include stand-level data in
your study. we I’m trying to think of a case where we care about plants, in a plantation setting.
The point of the willow
Focus on what’s important. I’m not Figure 1 is necessary; will you use these data for anything? If
it’s just background, you could hide these numbers in Table 1.
You cannot distinguish the effect of age of the stem at the time the wood was laid down from the
year in which it was laid down. You are interpreting differences as due to age, but it seems just
as likely that differences could be due to interannual variation in weather conditions (wet year vs.
dry year). Maybe you will address this problem in your Discussion. There is probably a safe
term to use for your results. Time at which the wood was laid down?
Specific comments
Don’t report more than the hundredth’s place for a P value (or 1 significant digit, whichever
comes first).
26, 35 I think you asked whether to mention that other varieties were planted; I wasn’t sure.
Reading this, I found it confusing that you tell us that you used four varieties and the next
sentence has 10. You could say “a number of willow varieties” if you don’t want to suggest that
it was only your four.
32 I had trouble with a plant being harvested and regrown. I think there are words you could
use that wouldn’t make this a surprise. “coppiced” instead of harvested, and something other
than “plant”?
40 This says that all the willows were coppiced after one year, and isn’t that inconsistent with 32
where you said they were harvested for the first time in 2006?
44-57 I’m not sure it’s worth this whole paragraph to give the sources for the met data. Can you
get away without documenting them? Try putting them in footnotes to the table if you have to
show them.
72 Are you pooling varieties here? I don’t get it.
78 I prefer to see P values than tests against an arbitrary alpha.
You use WUE in section headings but not in the text.
Try to focus your writing on the plants, not the statistics. Cite the statistical results
parenthetically.
106 I think it would be helpful to remind us that the years are represented by wood laid down at
different times.
118 I was confused, can you use language that makes clear what the contrast is between this
result and the one you just told us?
121 I must be missing something here. Plants get larger over time, so basal area per plant
increases over time.
Table 1 should be transposed; numbers to be compared should be in columns. I had trouble
figuring out what the units were for the columns that were not years. And the columns that were
years would need a heading? We’re really not used to reading headings in rows. You’re going to
have the same problem when you transpose it, identifying the years.
Figure 2: I think you need to define some terms. Is it the largest stem of each individual? If it
were the largest stem on the plot, there wouldn’t be a variance associated with it. Plant basal area
is the sum of stems of an indiviual, right?
How did you decide what order to present the sites in, here? It’s different in Figure 3.
Figure 3 lacks an explanation of the three observations for each combination of site and variety.
If these are simply replicates, then there is no basis for pairing them across sites, and this is a
serious flaw in the presentation. You could show the three reps with the sites and varieties
organized along the x axis.
Figure 4: The dotted lines are almost invisible. The figure caption could tell us that these are
based on three growth rings. It’s helpful to give n so we can interpret the standard error. I’m not
sure about “annual” on the y axis?
Figure 5 does not graph change as a variable. Maybe you could say that it compares the wood
from the first and third years. Can you avoid writing two sentences about the statistics?
Sentences about the differences would be better (if you want sentences like these in the figure
caption).
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
Read punctuation rules for semicolons. I think the only time you use them in a list is when one of
the items in the list contains a comma.
Figure 1 gives the year of planting; why?
95 The response is more sensitive? What response? The response to water stress is more
sensitive to water stress…
114 You can drop the first sentence, the second sentence is better.
All the figures look like I have double vision; do you know why they are doubled? Did you bring
them into PowerPoint or something? Select one image and delete it.
Megan Skrip
This paper describes changes in occupancy of ruffed grouse in New York State, where it is has
been in decline. The changes in observations of grouse from 1980 to 2000 were related to forest
inventory from the same time periods (actually, I was confused about the time periods). The
study is important for conservation of this species. Whether it is more important as a case study
for the regional approach, as indicated by the abstract, will be more clear when we see the
Introduction and Discussion.
General comments
Your paper focuses on change, which is interesting, but I think you should also tell us the current
(and/or former) values of the state variables, not just the first derivative with time. How about
showing us a map of the state with the densities of grouse? Similarly, you analyze the percent
change in young forest area, where it strikes me that the percentage change of a very small
number might not give us the right idea. If an area went from almost no habitat to zero, that
would be a 100% change, but have little effect compared to a larger absolute loss from an area
that had more to begin with.
Have there been only two BBAs? What does the range of years mean? You mention different
years in different parts of the methods. It seems risky to compare only two years of observation
(1980 and 2000); if additional years are available, you should make use of those data or you won’t
know what’s interannual noise and what’s a long term change over time. When I present longterm data on forest floor nutrient content, I joke about “two points determine a line.” It’s
possible, depending on which years you pick, to find a significant increase or decrease over time,
whereas an analysis of the entire time series shows that there is almost no change.
The methods for the FIA data should be described. I think the methods changed between the
fourth and fifth inventory. I have seen the data interpreted incorrectly for change over time (by
Jerry Jenkins). What is the relationship between this information and the NLCD? What’s the
effect of using both, if they disagree?
I think your methods section could be easier to use without the directional signaling and
orientation you have tried to provide. Methods sections are normally more straightforward.
When you try to introduce us to where you are going (to multiple destinations) and then take us
there, I get confused, because I’m being asked to remember more things at once, and you end up
repeating yourself. The purpose of the methods should be clear in the Objectives (maybe we
should be carrying those along with our drafts, like the abstract). You could use section headings
if you want, they don’t require intellectual overhead. The explanations you give for why you
used these methods will be very good in your introduction leading up to your objectives.
Specific comments
You refer to Chapter 1, and your figures and tables are labeled 2.something, suggesting that this
is Chapter 2. You don’t want reviewers to think that this is a thesis chapter.
21-24 This is the kind of introduction I think you could drop. You could use it in your
Objectives!
24 You could start here. The NY BBA divide the state into 5 x 5 km blocks (I would even omit
the first part of this sentence). Methods sections are just a place to keep information that’s
relevant to your paper. We do need to know about the aspects of the survey that you used.
24 It’s not clear what these citations are for. We do need a citation for the BBA.
27 If you used the habitat types, we need to know what they were. If you didn’t, we don’t need
to know about it. We probably don’t need to know how many other species were recorded.
29-33 Assumptions weaken any argument; they could be faulty. You can just describe changes
in reported occupancy, and skip all this. Discussing how the actual might differ from reported is
a good topic for the Discussion.
48 Did you eliminate these blocks from your study? If so, you should probably say so when you
describe your experimental design. I don’t understand why you would eliminate waterdominated areas rather than including them as another habitat type.
49-51 Here’s another of the “first, second” formats I didn’t like. See if you other reviewer likes
them. Why are two first and two second? Is this important for me to remember?
I think we need to know how these variables are defined.
52-53 Maybe this goes in the Introduction, justifying your approach.
55-58 Are you introducing unnecessary acronyms? I had an idea for Table 1 (below) but I’m not
sure how to avoid them in your other tables. If you have to use them, I think you can improve
them. It’s not important that they be the variables you used in your code.
75 I’m not familiar with these acronyms. Spell out the words unless the acronyms are more
familiar than the words to your audience.
82-83 Are you sure that you need a nice distribution of lag distances to get reliable results? If so,
can you give a citation? Did you try it? If there are reasons to expect mechanisms to vary across
regions, the within-region model seems like it could be useful.
90-97 I think you should tell us about occupancy before telling us the percentage change.
I think a map would be important, not only because you could show us raw occupancy data, but
because many of your readers will not know how these regions are defined.
98-107 Don’t describe patterns you don’t believe are real. I think you could say for sure that 5 of
the regions fell close to 40% decline. I don’t believe that the slope you could put through those
points is meaningful; do you? I see only one outlier for change in occupancy. And as I said
above, I don’t trust these units. The regions could each have lost the same exact amount of land
area in young forest and the same amount of grouse, and fall all over this map based on
differences in the initial amounts. Can you think of a clever way to show the change with the
original units? You could show the two inventories on the X and Y, with a 1:1 line for no change,
but this would require two graphs and we would have to inspect them to see if the regions
behaved as predicted. Maybe coding the symbols for regions for high and low loss rates would
help.
108-114 The first sentence is about the models and could probably be dropped. The second
sentence is very good, just work your statistics (P values?) and references to tables into sentences
like that.
Cite your Tables more often. The next sentence doesn’t cite them until the end. Especially since
Tables 2 and 3 look so much alike, it will help us if you cite each of them in the right places.
120-122 Is there a way to write this so that it’s about your system instead of about the statistics? I
don’t see what what we are supposed to get out of this.
Table 1. I had a great idea for eliminating these acronyms. You could have a column for each of
the terms, and they could be long descriptions. Then you could have a column for each of the
models with a check mark for the terms it includes.
Tables 2 and 3: Unfortunately, I don’t have a great idea for how to avoid the acronyms here. I
think you could improve them. “PLAND-FOR” sounds like “planned for.” I can’t guess how
you picked this. Oh, percentage of land in forest? That took me 5 minutes so I bet your other
readers are not going to find it instantly intuitive. The units don’t matter to your results. (Oh,
maybe P could be for proportion, just as bad.) “Forest” would be much better. “CLUMPY” is
cute but distracting. “Adjacency” and “Effort” are good. Words are good!
I’m not crazy about Tables 2 and 3. There are some other papers in the class that have these.
Maybe you guys read papers like these all the time, and I’m out of date.
Figure 1: This would be better with 2000 on the y axis, 1980 on the x axis, and a 1:1 line. You
could label “decline” below the line.
Figure 3. Did you define regular and robust semivariograms in the Methods? This distinction is
not mentioned in the Results, either.
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
We’re not reviewing abstracts now but I would ask whether this is a methods paper or a paper
about ruffed grouse.
34 This sentence would be good for your Objectives. I think I’d be fine without it here, and I
wouldn’t have to figure out how this paragraph related to the two things you promised. Is it the
first or the second? The next paragraph starts with “Second”, which means I have to remember
where we were before.
90 “but”? What’s the contrast? 20% is not major, which I don’t learn until the next sentence.
127 Discussion, for the discussion section?
130-131 I wondered if you could put the meaning first and then the evidence. As a topic
sentence, this leaves me cold.
Artem Treyger
This paper describes tree regeneration in powerline cuts in New York State, comparing a study in
1975, a follow-up in 91-92, and new observations in 2002-2004. The results are interesting
because they show changes in species assemblages consistent with the predictions of a warming
climate.
I am concerned that the power of the tests may be exaggerated. You should try them with the
ROW as the experimental unit. It will be a shame if your differences are no longer statistically
significant, but I think you need to know the answer before you go to press.
General comments
I think you should show your observations, graphing the slopes is way too abstract. I’m even a
little worried that you’re losing information by using proportions instead of counts, but I hope
you’ll address this issue in your Introduction or Discussion (if not, add it to the Methods). If you
show the data with the regression lines, we’ll also see how well they fit, which is not currently
reported. There might be a nice way to highlight the northern and southern species and climate
divisions in such a graph.
The experimental design is difficult to understand, in part because of differences across the three
surveys, and also because of the multiple plots per site. Are you using the plot as the
experimental unit? It would seem that they are not independent, and you should regard them as
replicates within site. Using 39 plots instead of 14 sites would exaggerate your statistical power
and your confidence in the differences you describe.
The number of sites was 22 in 1975, 20 in 1991-92, and 14 in 2002-04. Did you use only the 14 for
your study of change over time? If so, maybe you should start out by telling us that you used 14
sites, instead of starting with 22. (Or if you can justify the use of plots instead of sites as your
e.u., which I doubt, then the number of plots should be made clear.)
What is the number of observations in each ecological province? 3 in 221, 3 in 222, 5 in 211, 3 in
M211? If you need to go with the ROW as the experimental unit, then maybe using climate
divisions would be better. You’ll know when you do the analysis whether these sample sizes are
adequate.
Specific comments
31-32 The narrative jumps around in time. Would it be possible to organize it chronologically?
Maybe it’s just this sentence that needs to move. Also we need to know that the “original study”
in line 33 refers to the 1975 study described in the previous paragraph. I thought Megan gave too
much direction in her Methods; maybe you could ask to see her examples. For example, a
sentence at the start could say that you compared measurements taken at two points in time. Oh,
it’s three points in time! See, I’m not oriented. Note, however, that your Objectives will probably
make the experimental design very clear, obviating some of the need for explanation here.
36 This list is hard to read. You can use semicolons to separate items in a list if an item contains
commas. Or maybe you should just use more, shorter, sentences.
38 Avoid relative time terms, like “the past 28 years,” that depend on when you were writing.
This designation will be obsolete by the time your paper is published. You want your paper to be
timeless!
48 Why do we need the location of trees? It looks like you analyzed stem density by species. If
you didn’t use this location information, don’t tell us about it. Even though the mylar maps
sound cool. It doesn’t affect your results that the maps were on mylar, right? It doesn’t even
affect your results that they were mapped.
51-52 This seems complicated, does it matter that you subdivided them, if you add them up
before you analyze the data?
53 This does sound important, and I don’t think I understand it. What’s the danger in including
the end plots? They might fall outside the range of the original plots? These aren’t adjacent
plots, are they? We really need to know more about these plots, especially if they are the e.u.
61-64 This seems like it repeats information in Table 1, except for putting it in a better order
(Table 1 being in alphabetical order, which conveys nothing). I suggest adding this information
about successional status and latitude to Table 1.
64-65 This is an important decision and I hope we’ll hear more about it later. You would report
an increase in an assemblage that didn’t actually increase, as long as the competing assemblages
decreased more.
71-74 Is this necessary, or is this what anyone would do for a linear regression?
102 You didn’t tell us that these data were collected or how they were obtained. Since there are
only 14 ROWs, maybe you could put them in a table. Even so, I’d want to know what “effective”
soil depth means.
113-122 Classic case of describing your statistics but not your results (you’re not alone). You say
that provinces differ but not which way or how much.
123-125 What does it mean that they have a large coefficient magnitude?
126-143 This is much better! Can you write the previous two paragraphs with this clarity of
meaning?
145-149 Can you say what this tells us about the forest?
Table 1, if better organized, can eliminate a paragraph of text.
Table 2 doesn’t have as much information as it seems! The four numbers in each row are the
same for 6 of the 7 rows. Your textbook has some fun examples of unnecessary tables. This could
be given in a sentence of your text. It would be way better if we could see visually how the
provinces differ (in a revised Figure 1); the table of significance of differences is not as important.
Figure 1. I don’t see any other place in the paper where you refer to the sites by number. It’s
confusing to see them because there are 14 sites and the numbers go higher (probably they were
assigned earlier). The map will be easier to read if you just mark the points with a common,
prominent, symbol (I suggest something larger than the dots you have now, maybe about as big
as the numbers). Then the numbers for the ecological provinces will be easier to see. I think it
would be nice to have the shading shown in a legend, those are always easier to find than
explanations in figure captions.
Figure 2. Is there a way to put the legend in the figure? The ellipses could be labeled in the
figure. The axes could be extended, right, to make room to show the symbols? It seems crowded
at the top now.
Figure 3. Graphs with time on the x axis would be easier to understand. If you used stacked
bars, you could even show us individual species, which are currently not reported in your paper.
Figure 4 looks like output from some software other than graphing software. Can you export it
in another form or get the values and graph them in a better
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
52 You already told us this on 46. No, you didn’t tell us about species on l. 46. You can tell us
once and reorganize.
57 “less” for mass nouns, “fewer” for count nouns. Patronize only supermarkets that have aisles
for “15 items or fewer” not “15 items or less.”
You want to avoid the apostrophe for the possessive, in formal writing, as the apostrophe for
contractions. This one is especially bad, as you would use “species’s” for possessive of one
species and “species’” for possessive of multiple species. You don’t want your readers to notice
any such thing, so see if you can do away with these.
Bhavin Bhayani
This paper describes tests of methods for purifying wood extracts for use in biofuel production.
General comments
The Methods section was divided into sections with headings, and I could follow how it was
organized. The Results section is not so clearly organized. You should use paragraph breaks and
topic sentences. I don’t understand why you didn’t identify the figures for us (all of them are X).
The first figure referenced is not here. A table is referenced that isn’t here.
I put some effort into trying to understand your paper in spite of these handicaps. You should
not expect any journal reviewer to do so. If a journal editor saw a paper like this, it would be
returned to the author without review.
There is a lot of material in the Results section that is not results. You have discussion, and you
have background (derivation of equations).
In your next draft, I hope to understand your paper better and be able to give you more
substantive review.
The measurements were replicated, you said, but you didn’t tell us what you did with that
information.
Will it be satisfying to your readers that you tested sugar maple wood? Maybe your replication
could have been directed to testing other species of wood!
Specific comments
4 Telling us that the maple was from a local source doesn’t seem like it’s very helpful
information. What might be important to know about the source? Was it live or dead? How old
was it? Is heartwood is different from sapwood, do we need to know about that?
I think it would be important to know what the extractant is.
7-8 We should know what times and temperatures you used.
7 Different mass removals were achieved by filtering? Maybe this is a mistake.
Figure 1 is missing. None of the figures are numbered. The figure captions are not always on the
same page as the figures.
16-19 I think you should tell us the time intervals at which all these measurements were made
(the automated one, the graduated cylinder, and samples for analysis).
You have line numbering restarting every page (there is no reason for this now that the lines are
computer generated) and no page numbers. I’ll trust you can figure out the comments!
3 Is “clean” water a well defined term? Later you refer to de-ionized water and also DI water
(this acronym is not defined).
21 You could say in a few words what methods were used, giving a citation is enough for a
researcher who wants to duplicate your methods but not enough for the casual reader to
understand your paper.
The figures use symbols that are not easy to recognize because they are continuously
overlapping. You could use lines with different patterns. You have a gray line that is almost
invisible.
The figures look very similar and we have to look at the captions to tell what distinguishes them
(and some of the captions are incorrect). You could combine figures with common axes into
panels, and label them prominently to show what they are about. It would be easier to
understand the different lines if they were identified in the figure instead of in the caption.
Did you think about the number of digits in your regression equations? Are the equations
important to show?
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
3 This sentence does not help the reader, only the reference could be helpful. Put it
parenthetically where it could be most useful.
Capitalization of your section headings is not consistent.
4 Do we need this acronym?
6 Is this a paragraph break? I was looking because I wish you would use paragraph breaks. It’s
very hard to see them if you don’t indent and don’t leave a space. I said in class that it was fine
to do either, the only thing not to do is neither. There is room for “The” on the previous line, so I
think you are using neither!
Carrie Rose Levine
This paper describes results from deer exclosures established in 1992 in two sites that differ in
deer browsing pressure. The exclosures promoted tree regeneration in the site with more deer.
Germinating seeds from inside and outside the exclosures were not so different, indicating that
the effect of deer on regeneration is from browsing.
General comments
I know that there is a lot of interest in the effect of deer on tree regeneration. What is the interest
in herbs, sedges, and grasses? This will be clear from your Introduction, I hope. Depending on
the question, would it be useful to report the frequency of occurrence of these species in the
exclosures and controls? They are reported in the seed bank study only.
I think it’s important to describe the Roosevelt site as having more deer. You say that there are
no data, but you interpret your results in light of the differing deer densities at the two sites. Can
you say that you saw more evidence of deer browse, or more deer poop, or more bedding sites? I
know there are lots of ways that people measure deer presence. Maybe you don’t have data, but
you can say “personal observation.”
I couldn’t tell from your methods section whether the 1992 data were collected before or after the
exclosures were established. They were collected in spring and fall, but we don’t know the time
of exclosure. Even if the data were collected immediately after exclosure, it seems like you
should be using them as a control for pre-treatment differences in your plots.
You mention that data were collected in 1993-1996, but you don’t show the results. I think these
would be very interesting. Without them, we don’t know how great interannual variation could
be; there are certainly some types of environmental monitoring where the interannual variation is
such that you could get a significant increase or decrease by comparing only two points in time,
while the overall change is not detectable. This is less likely to be a problem with long-lived
plants. It would be nice to see how much change accumulated over the first four years of
treatment; this might have implications for management.
A related comment is that “year” is not really what you’re hoping that the difference in sampling
dates gives you; you want to treat it as “time since treatment.”
Specific comments
Your definition of the sapling class sounds like you are saying that the height of deer browse is 50
– 199 cm. I think you want to say that you measured stems greater than 50 cm in height and
shorter than the height of deer browse (199 cm). I think this is probably not true, and a height
cufoff was used rather than a local assessment of the height of deer browse. Also, 199 cm seems
improbable; do you believe that the height assessment was accurate to 1 cm? I think you should
just say that you counted tree stems 50 cm to 2 m in height.
26 Is this area relevant? Maybe it pertains to deer management.
45, 60 These section headings could be improved to be specific to your study
61 Does it matter what time of year the seeds were collected? Does the success of cold
stratification depend on how long the “summer” treatment lasts?
64 Why is it important to remove roots?
Is the order of this section chronological? Were seeds stratified before roots were removed?
Maybe the problem is the second sentence, which could move to the topic position. Right now it
sounds like they were germinated after stratification but before they were laid out in trays.
85 Don’t use the units as a substitute for your variable definition. The same applies to your
figures. Say “density” or “species richness.”
The results could go farther to describe the direction and magnitude of effects. Significance is
easy to indicate parenthetically and need not be the focus of the results.
Figures are not publication quality. Find out what format your journal wants them in, and see if
this makes them less fuzzy.
I would like to read the controls on the left of the treatments, because we read from left to right.
I wonder if “High deer” and “Low deer” would be better descriptors for your sites than
“Rockefeller” and “CIES.”
I’m not sure it makes sense to compare every bar in Figures 1 (a and b); this suggests that you
care about every interaction. I think we want to know whether the sites are different, whether
exclosure had an effect, maybe based on the difference between 92 and 04, and whether the effect
of exclosure differed by site. But this graph tells me that stem density at Rockefeller in 2004 was
significantly higher than the control at CIES in 1992. Is this a conventional analysis for this
experimental design?
Table 1 could be organized to give a row for each species, with sites and treatments across the top
and numbers to show which species are present in each case. I object to this table because the
lines do not have a common meaning.
I don’t know why your numbers are in parentheses. There is an accounting convention to show
negative numbers this way!
Nick Pitel
This paper describes forest health following the recent forest tent caterpillar outbreak. The topic
is of interest especially if it can be published quickly.
General comments
“Annual” mortality sounds like a recurring thing, which one might calculate over a number of
years, but report in units involving years. I wonder if you should call this something more
specific, like “2007 mortality” or “post-outbreak mortality”
Surely the best-fit models are an important result and shouldn’t be buried in a footnote to a table.
Your results section will be improved by putting them there, as that paragraph currently doesn’t
describe the predictors.
I didn’t understand what became of the A horizon soils. They don’t appear in Table 1. But didn’t
you use the models to tell you which variables were important? I think it would be an important
result to tell people where best to monitor soil conditions.
I didn’t really get much from the modeling exercise. I think you need to write the results in terms
of what you learned about the forest, not about the models.
Specific comments
6 I wonder if you should explain why the years are different in MA from the other states.
27 It sounds like you are comparing states, but I think you mean you compared years. That’s not
the only problem with this sentence. I think you should say that you counted trees that died in
the interval. Did you ever tell us that you had tagged trees? You should probably tell us that this
is an improvement over Dusty’s study, because he couldn’t tell when trees had died, at least in
NY.
41 similar to what? “using a system similar to that used by Bailey” If it’s similar but not
identical, maybe you have to describe it.
50 It’s not important that the soils were in paper bags. It’s important that you corrected the
weights to oven-dry weights when reporting exchangeable cations. Did you do that? Is that how
it’s normally done?
56 The 1:2 ratio applies to solution:soil or soil:solution; you had better say which.
66 Variables should be log-transformed if the residuals are not normal. This says you
transformed variables with non-normal distributions.
94 How did you determine the soil order? This information belongs in your Methods.
You say “amount” of Ca but I think you only know the concentration.
108 So here, you say that deeper soils have more cations, but is that relevant if you measured
only the concentration?
I like the coding of stands by years of defoliation in the figures. Use a common legend.
In Figure 1, the zero year outline is very faint. I think you lost your aspect raio: the circles are not
quite round. The inset map looks distorted.
Captions: I don’t think you can say that points represent a “stand +/- s.e.”, those aren’t in the
same units! “and coded” dangles.
Figure 3, 5, 6: I don’t think “% SM” will be understood by your readers. I would guess it to
mean the SM in the stand as a percentage of all stems. You could say “Sugar Maple Mortality
(%)”
I think the years may be important to include in the figures or captions.
Figure 4: What is the significance of the 70% line?
Table 1 shows transformations of variables. These probably belong in the units column, which
shows them as not transformed. Did you include both in your models? Then include them on
additional lines.
Is it useful to tell us how you coded the class variables?
Table 2: is this important to include? It takes up a lot of space.
Table 3 will be easier to read if we don’t have to read footnotes. I think you can include all this
information in the table.
Table 4: There are several tables like this in the current crop of papers. I’m not crazy about them.
Maybe one of you will come up with a creative alternative.
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
14 I bet you don’t mean that all these species were common in each stand.
20, 22 We don’t need to know what units you will use to report these variables. Proportion,
right?
24 You mean that they were measured by two people. It’s not important how many people
calculated the average.
36 Comma in a list of two items
48 Same deal, we don’t care what units you used in your methods section, only what units you
report them in. Um, if you don’t report soil horizon depths, should this be here?
49 “same side” would mean what, across pits. Compass direction? I think you mean same side
of the pit.
61 This says you didn’t investigate any variables that Wood included.
94 They can’t both be highest. Say “the two” were highest.
95 Not clear: is this one of the Alfisol sites?
95 Your sentence says that these two sites had highest Ca in the upper B horizon, compared to
other horizons?
113 I expect this to mean “same” as above, you mean same as each other. How about using “in
common”? Oh, you do in the next sentence.
Fig 3 caption: because there is only one value for the stand. Or “because this variable is
calculated at the stand level.”
I wonder if you should include the Al and Ca:Al results, since they don’t show much.
I don’t understand the horizontal lines in Table 1. Oh, because you centered “Predictor
Variables”—I read the label to refer to what is below it, which is what you did for your other
headings. I bet there’s a convention for that. Check out the rules for your target journal.
Use “unitless” or “none.” Your dashes are undefined.
Use semicolons to separate items in a list only if one of the items contains a comma.
Braulio Quintero
This paper describes forest composition, stem density, and basal area in 15 sites in an area of
western Puerto Rico. The sites vary in land-use history (sugar cane, palm, or coffee plantations),
age since abandonment, and elevation.
General comments
I enjoyed reading this paper, the organization was straightforward and it wasn’t too long.
The fancy tests using multivariate approaches were very impressive to me, as I don’t understand
any of them. I think the paper would be strengthened by adding some more direct
representation of your data. You could show species composition with stacked bars, for example,
grouped by age, land-use history, and elevation. We ought to be able to see the same patterns
you describe with the more elaborate approaches. Do we really need ordination and indicator
species analysis to show us which species occur on which former land use types?
I don’t recognize the species in your lists. Will your audience recognize them and have some
opinion about them? Is there a way to capture in the tables enough description for us to see the
patterns you want us to see? You could add whether they are native or exotic, early or late
successional. Adding the families would be meaningful to some additional readers. If you are
writing for the Journal of Caribbean Studies, then maybe this is not an issue.
Is Appendix III going to be in this paper or is it a mistake carried over from your thesis? If it’s
part of this paper you need to include it for review.
The abstract was not part of this review, but I was disappointed to see that it showed no benefit
of the Getting Started Exercise. It lacks a problem statement and it lacks conclusions.
The title isn’t up for review now, either, but I note that the topic is “forest recovery.” If you want
to address this topic, I suggest you relate your results to it. Are some sites further along a
continuum of recovery than others? How is recovery identified? You don’t tell us the size of the
trees, but you could calculate quadratic stem diameter and include it in your tables. Is it defined
by species composition?
Specific comments
3 It’s not clear why we are interested in this river. It would be good if the first sentence made
some reference to your study. It’s not clear how this valley relates to your study sites. I think
you should include a map!
14 I think it would be important to know about how long the sites were in agricultural use. Can
you include the date of clearing, even if a range of decades?
17 sounds vague. Add detail or stick to what’s relevant to your study.
20-23 I was confused by the years going forward and backward. Maybe you can reorganize this
paragraph.
35 Don’t you need to assign an age, not a range?
36 For an author, you would say “personal observation.” Are you sure you can’t find a reference
for this? I bet there are a hundred.
39 This list doesn’t correspond to the list on the previous page.
45-50 This section can be simplified if you include the land use history in your table. I don’t get
anything out of sentences listing the plot designations and how they were classified.
51-52 This sounds important but I don’t understand it.
58 Structural characteristics sounds vague; can you be more specific?
66-69 This sounds like you are using a test even though the assumptions are not met. Is that
true, or is there a better way to say what you’re trying to say here?
70 But you said on 51-52 that you could compare only one age class?
92-94 I’m on the warpath against unnecessary equations. These are simple equations and you
could explain them in a sentence.
98 you called this 95% on line 66. There you gave alpha, which I think is better.
The Results section should indicate the number of plots.
Tables 2 and 3 will be better combined, we will see what distinguishes them in a table heading.
Figure 1 needs to be publication quality.
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
41 If you tell us that you used a stratified design, you have to tell us right away what the strata
were. Or you can drop this sentence.
116 I think your study area is the whole valley! Are you giving us the sum of your plot areas? Is
that useful? The number of plots is important.
122-125 These sentences are not well related
131-134 Does this information add anything to what is already in your tables? If you could add
some meaning, that would be good. Is there anything we should know about these species?
134 Tables should not be the subject of a sentence. Tell us what we should see and cite the table.
Add page numbers
Page third to last: Why are we reading these plot names? You need to point them out in the
figure? They don’t mean much to me.
151-152 This would be a good topic sentence for the paragraph. It starts out being about the
statistics. I liked the third and fourth sentence, they were about what we should see.
153-154 Good topic sentence.
177 Only one can be closest.
Table 1 says “structural characteristics.” Is this the definition I was looking for? They don’t all
look like structural characteristics to me.
Table 2. Don’t repeat the units in the table heading. They are in the table.
Metric tonnes: T is not SI. Mg is.
Kikang Bae
This paper describes soil respiration, fine root biomass, and litterfall in young and mature forests
in three different sites in New Hampshire. The study combines a lot of information about
ecosystem scale carbon fluxes and has the potential to draw general conclusions about young and
old stands, because of the scope of the study.
General comments
I am still not happy about at the quick and dirty calculation of respiration, using the measured
mid-day rates extended (day and night) to the midpoint between measurements. Have you seen
any published annual respiration rates calculated with this method? You told me that the normal
way is to correct for diurnal and seasonal variation using a respiration as a function of
temperature and some local measure of temperature. The nearest met station may not be very
close, but I would think anything would be better than nothing. At the very least, you should
make a calculation of how much bias you think is introduced by using a mid-day flux rate during
the night. You could use an estimate of diurnal temperature flux--I know this is treated in
Campbell’s book on environmental biophysics but there are probably lots of sources relating air
temperature to soil temperature. There are also a lot of eddy-flux measurements from Bartlett;
you should read Hollinger’s papers and get an idea of respiration flux day and night in the leafoff condition.
I think that’s my only substantive problem with the paper, the rest of my suggestions are about
the presentation. You need to explain how TCBA is calculated. You need to explain how you
calculated C in roots and litter. I know the answers (well, I don’t know what you used to convert
biomass to C, but I expect the error is smaller than your problem with temperature effects,
above).
Most importantly, you need to explain your experimental design. What is the experimental unit?
The plot? The stand? You say there were three plots per stand, but in the results you tell us that
n = 2. I also saw n = 4 plots. When you calculate TCBA, is it by plot?
Specific comments
37 I happen to know that you took all measurements in 30 m x 30 m plots (isn’t this true?) I
don’t think the buffer is relevant until we start applying treatments.
40 The year of the measurements is important. Do you think one year is enough?
46 Daily could mean day to day; is that what you mean? Or within the day (diurnal).
51 regression of what as a function of what? Maybe your calculation is not what I thought; I
don’t understand this.
56 remind us of the number of plots (remind me: what about the fourth plot?)
57-59 Why do you think this detail is important? You don’t tell us anything about how the soil
samples were collected. We got hugely different results between 2003 and 2004 because of the
sampling methods.
62-65 You make it sound like the same methods applied to the 2004 and 2008 root collections.
The differences might be important. You should address this possibility in your Discussion.
Make sure the necessary information is here.
73 You didn’t explain how total belowground carbon allocation is estimated. It’s not measured
directly! It assumes zero change in storage, for example. Do you think that’s a good assumption?
68-70 Litter was collected when? Once? For the year? I happen to know that Bali accidentally
discarded some of the August samples. What are you going to do about that?
You didn’t say how you measured respiration under snow! This is important. Did you clear the
snow? Did you not use the collars? The answers need to be in the Methods section.
90 This “respectively” is really hard to follow because you just gave us a list of sites, and it
doesn’t apply to them.
91 higher in what?
94, 95, 97 It is more meaningful to show us the P value than to tell us it was less than 0.05, and it
doesn’t take any more space.
102 “had no influence” means it wasn’t significant? Can you tell us how small it had to be, not to
be significant, with your statistical power? I can’t see Figure 3 so this is hard for me to judge.
106-107 This sounds like a nice generalization but I don’t understand it. Can you explain it
better?
I like that you used open symbols for mature and closed for young stands.
In Figure 1, the BT-Y symbols are smaller than the other. The line weight is not the same around
the diamonds as around the circles and triangles. The date indications are a little vagues; is that
okay?
I hope you will discuss the unusual behavior of BT-Y. What time of day was it, what
temperature was it, how did it relate to the other measurements on that day?
Is there anything “monthly” about this graph? Is the flux per second the best units?
Figure 2: you need to define the asterisks.
Do we need to learn BT, JB, HB, or can you write them out?
Figures 3 and 4: We need to know how the curves were fit. How did you decide to use a line or
a curve? I’m not convinced about the left panel in Figure 4!
You could use the same symbols in 3 and 4 that you used in 1, and we could see the sites.
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
48 I think the scaling topic should be in a different paragraph from the measurements.
53 It’s not the sum of the measurements, the measurements are rates!
61 Tim admits that his sampling is not random. I wish it were systematic.
62 pits are not collected
84, 85 compared to what?
98 Show this P value, too
194 Here you say 4 plots per stand!
Don’t capitalize Total Belowground Carbon Allocation.
123 Here you say n=20
140 Here n = 3
Dan Gurdak
This paper describes fine and coarse woody debris in an elevational transect from low to high
elevation in a topical forest in Peru. In addition to biomass, there is information on respiration
rates.
General comments
If you are interested in uncertainty propagation, there is a paper by Ernest Lo that uses an
analytical approach (to CWD, in fact); I have his spreadsheets if you’re interested. I also have
some R code for a Monte Carlo on precipitation, and of course the spreadsheets for my Monte
Carlo in Excel.
Which do you think is more important, the biomass data or the fluxes? I’m guessing the biomass
data. I think you should use figures to show the biomass of coarse and fine woody debris by site,
stacked by decay class. You have 10 graphs for respiration rates, and none for biomass. Patterns
are easier to see in graphs than tables, and they draw attention to your most important results.
When I think of an environmental gradient, I expect the observations to be arranged more or less
linearly along the axis of change, maybe evenly spaced. I think you need to address the unusual
configuration of your gradient. Since the odd one out wasn’t measured at the same time, I
wonder whether you even want to include it as part of the gradient.
You need to develop a sense of what’s important to include in the methods section. You give
details that aren’t important to reproducing your study, but you omit information that is
important to understanding it. Read other papers, particularly ones for studies you are familiar
with (are there some of these?) and you’ll get more of a sense. Your supervisor needs to know
that you did routine things correctly, but your journal audience will assume that you did them
the right way.
I don’t get why you correct for void space and then correct it back for solid space (page 5). Can
you leave this out and give a simpler explanation? I would trust a simpler calculation: weigh the
sample and it tells you the density, including voids, that you need to convert your field
measurements of volume into mass.
The paper will be easier to read when it is shorter. Formatting could also help the reader move
through the paper. Your paragraph breaks are not visually obvious, and I’ll bet you a point on
your grade that your journal uses a different font for subheadings than for the text (size, bold,
italics, indent, or something). I think I could give the paper a better review if I could get through
it more quickly.
The two calculations of turnover differ in the two estimate of flux, which should be compared
directly. Note that respiration is not the only flux for C loss from CWD, there is also
fragmentation and DOC leaching. Is respiration most of it? Bill Currie was modeling this at one
time.
I hope you don’t link the temperature response to a global warming situation; any effect would
be transient and the long-term dynamics will be donor-controlled.
I promise a better review of your content if you can make the next draft more concise.
Specific comments
Is “decay class” more common than “decomposition class”? I’ll check: I got 14,000 hits in google
for “decay class” and only 1000 for “decomposition class” (combined with “forest”). So I vote for
“decay class” unless you convince me that the tropical readers are the 1000 in the minority.
I don’t think there is any value to your readers of the designations I, II, III, IV with your site
names. Can you avoid asking us to learn the site names, too? If the important feature is
elevation, could you label them with that? And give the names in a table somewhere for
reference.
Figure 1 is hard to follow. The scale is not that different between the two sets of insets; I think
you should use just one. I have never seen an elevational gradient represented with high
elevation at the bottom and low at the top. What are the lines on the base map, political
boundaries?
Oh, you have no line numbers! I’ll give page numbers and hope you can find the relevant text.
(Later, I started using letters. Please include line numbers in your next draft.)
2 You can’t cite papers in preparation. You can cite unpublished data or a personal
communication. Anyway, I don’t think you need this non-citation in the text, you have it in the
Table.
“There are wet and dry seasons but little change in temperature.”
3:1 This is confusing, you are referring to previous work? Can you give us what we need to
know in chronological order?
I don’t think we need this level of detail on the slope information. Would a different method give
an answer that would change your interpretation of the results?
I also don’t think I’ve ever read an explanation of correcting for projected area, though we do it
all the time. You consider the ground area to be the “true” area? At Hubbard Brook, we have to
correct the old-fashioned ground-area plots to the “correct” area, which we take to be the
projected area. Anyway, it shouldn’t be more than a sentence.
A Don’t describe the exception first. Also, this sounds terrible. How comparable are these
observations to yours? How many hundreds of miles away? Why don’t you just leave it out and
compare your results in the Discussion?
3 How big is the bias introduced by ignoring buttresses? How high up do buttresses go?
B I don’t think we need to know that you used a tape measure for the small stuff. But it might be
important to tell us how you “estimated” the height of the tall stuff.
I don’t think we need the formula for the volume of a truncated cone. But we do need to know
the definitions of decay classes.
C Don’t give us advice about how to interpret the results. Just do it.
D Are you talking about scaling to a per area basis? We will assume you did this right; anyone
would get the same answer.
What is the “proportion of solid wood space”? Can’t we fold this into a density estimate?
Do you know the species of the material you are collecting? I think you should mention that you
don’t.
E Way too much detail. We’ll get the right answer as long as we cut a piece and measure its
dimensions, we don’t need to know how many times you cut it, that it was in a plastic bag, or
how long you dried it for. We trust that you dried it long enough (we hope you weighed it and
dried it to constant weight, but 5 days is plenty). What might matter is how big the pieces were,
because large voids would not be represented in small samples.
Eq 3: Again, I don’t think you need to give simple equations, they break up the narrative and
don’t add anything that you couldn’t say with words.
Again, we’ll trust that you know how to convert to area.
F. I thought it didn’t sound right that you took samples of all CWD in your subplots. Then you
say “generally” which doesn’t sound like “all”, and earlier you say other samples were selected.
Can you simplify and shorten this description and still give your selection criteria? I’ve used
species and decay class; you don’t mention either.
I think the plastic bag method deserves more explanation. I thought plastic bags were gas
permeable. And they are open to the atmosphere?
7 Oh, I see, you can probably leave out all the details of how you handled the samples before
measurement, unless it’s important to mention briefly what conditions were met.
If you don’t do anything with this temperature data, don’t tell us about it.
7-9 most of this is not necessary
G I thought you assigned decay classes based on physical observations, usually how hard the
wood is, whether branches pull out (the 5 decay classes you didn’t describe, above). Are
decomposition classes different from decay class? I’m confused.
I don’t think you need to convert your samples from mass to C contest for estimating respiration
(you will for content). You measured respiration from samples of known mass, and you know
the mass of the CWD inventory. This is like converting for voids and converting back again;
leave it out.
H This sounds problematic. Saturated wood is not going to have good oxygen exchange. You
would get more of a T response at lower water content? I can see that this approach has the
advantage of being repeatable, where field moist water content would depend on what day you
measured it. You’ll need to address this in the Discussion. (With so many measurements, I think
you could have done both and described the interactions.)
Comments not worthy of a response to the Editor
The tables are printed too small. You should at least use landscape orientation. If the
I would define CWD at the first occurrence in the text. Don’t do it in the section heading. This
will also save you from starting a sentence with an acronym.
6 ditto for FWD
You define “fine” woody debris as “coarse” necromass. 2-10 cm in diameter? Not length?
Conducted is a weak verb. How about collected?
We don’t need to know where your systematic subplots were. But it would be nice to know why
your subplot sizes were different.