Assessing the Cooling Effect of Four Urban Parks of Different Sizes in a Temperate Continental Climate Zone: Wroclaw (Poland)
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is a resubmission that I have reviewed previously. The authors have addressed all of my concerns, and I recommend publication.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your substantial help in improving our work and for the encouraging words. Full response has been given in the attached file.
Kind regards
Jan
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for the opportunity to reread the manuscript “Assessing the cooling effect of urban parks in temperate continental climate zone: case study of the Wroclaw city in Poland.” I reiterate my earlier assessment that the paper could be of interest to readers of the journal. The authors have improved the paper through this revision. One small additional suggestion I would have is to consider moving the large Table 1 to an Appendix.
I appreciate the authors’ clarification of how they selected their four case study parks. However, I still have major concerns about the analysis that have not been addressed.
- In their response, the authors justify their decision not to conduct a more complete analysis of the 43 parks of Wroclaw by providing a list of other papers that analyzed only a park or a small number of parks. Note that the titles of these other papers reflect their purpose of analyzing “a medium size park”, “an urban park,” etc. rather than “a case study of a city”. If the authors choose to only analyze four parks, they should reflect that in their title, text, and conclusions.
- In addition to being misleading, the primary concern of analyzing only 4 parks is that the statistical methods used for this paper (correlation analysis) are inappropriate for such a small sample size. Other case studies using different methods would not have the same problem. I appreciate the additional disclaimers and modifiers added to the results and discussion about the limitations, but those do not offset the fundamental statistical problem. Additional significance tests do not “confirm the identified correlations” or negate the issue of using such a small sample for these tests.
I believe the misleading nature of the title and scope could be relatively easily addressed. However, the misuse of the statistics would require a new analysis, which was not conducted. I recommend either using the data from all 43 parks (perhaps I do not understand why these data are not available) or just treat the analysis as a comparison between 4 parks and do not try to make larger statistical claims. Yes, these parks are different and the park-level analysis is interesting. But I do not have confidence from those findings that there are necessarily larger implications between, for example, park shape and cooling effect. If it is not possible to conduct the analysis on the full data set of parks, I would remove those correlation analyses from the results. Simply saying “these correlations should be considered indicatively because of the sample size,” is not sufficient.
Thank you again for the opportunity to review this paper. Best regards in your work.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for the encouraging words and for the helpful suggestions. Full response has been given in the uploaded file.
Kind regards
Jan
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
You have addressed my concerns. Thank you
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
Thank you for your valuable comments and support.
Kind regards
Jan Blachowski
