The Role of Forest Stands Characteristics on Formation of Exterior Migratory Outbreak Spots by the Siberian Silk Moth Dendrolimus sibiricus (Tschetv.) during Population Collapse
, Olga A. Slinkina, Pavel V. Mikhaylov and Svetlana M. Sultson
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
please see the attached file
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
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Author Response
Dear collegue,
I thank You for Your rewiew. In brief, we accepted the majority of Your remarks. The only exclusion is remark to line 275: '"depth of 12, 250 voting trees" please explain, or even better supply the necessary explanation in the M&M'. Such explanation needs a lot of text; meanwhile, detalisation of these terms can be obtained from numerous machine learning sources or even from help files of R. These Your suggestions (1. How the finding relate to the global warming; 2. Is those outbreaks are 'Force Majeure'? or management tools should be considered) are accepted too.
Reviewer 2 Report
Overall, the design and analysis was appropriate. However, there were English grammar issues throughout and clarity can be improved in some aspects of the data collection.
L 38 – clarify “extremely poor”. Poorly understood or do the authors mean low diversity? Low diversity does not equate to quality, especially if it is the natural diversity that should exist in the Siberian boreal forest.
L 52-53 – English grammar is awkward for this sentence. I’ve noticed several places throughout the Introduction where the grammar is not correct.
L 55, 60 – Should be “climate change” not “changes”.
L 64 – The authors have not defined what they mean by “outbreak spots”. Since this is a running idea throughout the manuscript, a clear definition of timing, spatial scale, population dynamics, etc. for an outbreak spot is necessary.
L 86, 95 – Calling the site “forestry” is odd, but I will default to what the actual name is for the location.
L 97 – I assume Yenisei River. Clarify. Additionally, left bank and right bank only make sense because north is up. I recommend east bank and west bank of the Yenisei River.
L 96-98 – Revise sentence to clearly explain location.
L 104-117 – Methods need to be all past tense as the data has already been collected. Mean annual temperature was -1.8 °C. Also, space between numeral and unit throughout.
L 137 – Should be “forest stand characteristics”.
L 137-139 – What do the authors mean by “take”?
L 140 – Mean age, height, and diameter? Why not basal area of dominant species? Why just the dominant species? Seems basal area of host and non-host species would be helpful in prediction.
L141-142 – What reference stand? This is the only mention of this reference stand. Where was it located? How was it defined? What justifies the use as a reference stand?
L 154 – If you are referring to them as the genus, then it should be Vaccinium, capitalized. If you are using vaccinium as a common name (which I’ve never seen), then it shouldn’t be italicized. Whatever you do should be mirrored on L 209.
L 188 – Mapping units were never defined.
L 189 – Again, not clear what the authors mean by “taking”. Are they using it instead of “accounting for” or “composed of” here?
L 190 – “…were recorded…”
L 192 – Up until this point, you’ve used Siberian silk moth. Avoid randomly switching to scientific name. Also, takes is not correct there. Should be “Larch accounted for no more than…” Again, should be past tense.
L 203 – Be sure you call the forest types the same names you described up in the methods.
L 204, 216, 219, 221, 222 – Far better to just use (p < 0.001). more than 3 decimal places provides no additional information.
L 205 – As with the methods, the results need to be rewritten as past tense.
L 206, 208 – Bad form to refer to plants by just the specific epithet. Should be “C. macroura” or “sedge”.
L 207 – Fix grammar as the sentence makes little sense.
L 209-210 – Either “statistical differences” or “significant differences”, not both.
Figure 2 – Gradients of asterisks do not make sense. Testing the null hypothesis is a yes-no answer, not a gradient. Should just be a single asterisk for significant and NS for not significant.
Table 1 – What are the values in the table? When the authors say stand distribution, are they meaning mapping units?
L 228 – Figures do not “show” anything. You should just state the result and cite the figure.
L 271 – Absolutely unacceptable to say the “models prove”. Science does not prove or have proofs.
L 273, 292 – Again, don’t switch to scientific name when you’ve been using Siberian silk moth previously. Same with the hosts, you were using Siberian fir and Siberian stone pine before, don’t switch to scientific names now (L 275).
L 385-409 – Authors go back and forth between common names and scientific names – choose one style and use it throughout.
Methods and results should be all past tense. Additionally, there were places (commented above in the other suggestions) where the sentence structure and grammar made it hard to understand what the authors were saying.
Author Response
Dear collegue,
We thank You for Your remarks. We have accepted most of them with minor exclustion:
- L 140 – Mean age, height, and diameter? Why not basal area of dominant species? Why just the dominant species? Seems basal area of host and non-host species would be helpful in prediction. These features was used due to national forest inventory standards (see L 136). According to them, proportions of tree species (by stem volume) and above-mentioned characteristics of dominant species must be measured. The stem volume proportions of host and non-host species are proxy of basal area.
- What reference stand? This is the only mention of this reference stand. Where was it located? How was it defined? What justifies the use as a reference stand? It's just a stand which accepted as a standard of maximal density (added to manuscript). The usage of stand density index is close analog.
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L 385-409 – Authors go back and forth between common names and scientific names – choose one style and use it throughout. We cannot agree with these remarks. The alternation of common and scientific names is good practice to avoid tautology (e.g., see Baltensweiler W., Fischlin A. The larch budmoth in the Alps. In: Dynamics of Forest Insect Populations, 1988. Ed. Alan Berryman).
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L 206, 208 – Bad form to refer to plants by just the specific epithet. Should be “C. macroura” or “sedge”. These references are not concerned to plant species, but to groups of forest types. ‘Macroura’ here is forests with domination of Carex macroura in ground cover (see Section 2.3).
Reviewer 3 Report
In this paper, the characteristics of Abies sibirica- and Pinus sibirica-dominated forests stands in outbreak spots formed during Dendrolimus sibiricus outbreak in 2014–2017 were studied at the stage of population collapse. The authors classified the studied stands using decision trees and random forest algorithms to identify the key characteristics that determine the formation of outbreak spots. The classification results showed that the characteristics of the detected outbreak spots differ significantly from those previously described for dark coniferous stands of the southern taiga in Siberia. Overall, the work is interesting. However, the paper can be improved by considering the following.
1. In the introduction section, the critical contribution of the paper needs to be included. Further, the key literature review needs to be discussed to highlight the gap from the previous work.
2. A detailed literature review section should be part of the paper.
3. Better to present the key features of the data in a tabular form at the end of section 2.
4. The quality of the figures and tables need to be Improved.
Extensive editing of the English is required.
Author Response
Dear collegue,
We thank You for Your remarks and make changes according with first two of them. The tabular form of site features description, we guess, lead to unnecessarily large growth of the text volume (ca. 2 extra pages). We had tried it in the earlier version of manuscript... And we are ready improve the quality of figures, but we can not understand which enhansements we should undertake.
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors have addresses my comments in current version of the paper.
