Diversity, Distribution and Vegetation Assessment of Woody Plant Species in the Cold Desert Environment, North-Western Himalaya, India

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

This is my pleasure to go through the MS and suggest changes aimed at overall improvement of the article.

1. Introduction have focused on the importance of cold deset and its related issues, but havenot substantiated any research hypotheis and/or research question or focused on any research gap. The questions comes to mind is, 'why this study is important and what new knowledge it will bring forward to the academia?'

2. Line number 251-252--- 'A transect method' --discuss the trasect method. There are many method such as line transect or belt transect.. What method have authors used?

3. Ecological samplings are generally taken as random. Statified sampling is also popular but substantiating the rules/criterion of stratification is nessesary. Why 60 quadrat out of 180 was in agroforestry zone? Authors should shed light into the rationale behind this selection.

4. How authors have divided the wide region between forests, agroforestry and natural forest classification?

5. How agroforestry substantiated the use of Shannon Index. It is generally used in a natural system (https://www.inderscienceonline.com/doi/abs/10.1504/IJGW.2016.076333; https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Elements_of_Ecology.html?id=9nKOBAAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y)

6. What the Figure 4E is indicating? 

7. Lines 730-741: The conclusion is nt supported by the data and some of the statements are more like recomendation. So authors can revisit this section and rename as "Conclusion and Recomendation" to make the description more appropiate.

Minor comments,

In some tables it seemed to have been copy pasted from excel format, hence has some formating issues.

Figures can be clearer. Fig- 1 can be more clear as it represents study area. Latitude longitude markings need to be present and forested patches can be marked green for better visual understanding of the readers.

Abstract- first few lines on research gap, next on study area followed by methods, result and a strong concluding line/recomendation. I will suggest restructuring the abstract.

 

I will invite authors to respond on these comments before recomending publication. Overall I find the article novel, but that novelity need to be reflected in the introduction part and the conclsuion part.

 

 

Technically correct.

 

Author Response

Response to the comments of reviewer-1

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Interesting study, well structured and with appropriate analysis. Of interest for the knowledge of sustainable resources in high cold mountains.

 

Some comments:

1.- A suggestion at the editor's discretion: maybe delete Tables 1-6 from the text and convert them into an Annex. Replace them by a smaller table with the average values ​​for each form of growth.

 

2.-A table is missing with the values ​​of diversity index (Hˉ) and Evenness index (J’)1.-

 

3.- Add in Tables 1-6 with each name (

Khoksar Jahlma Hinsa Kutha) the altitude.

 

4.- The discussion is too long, try to reduce it.

 

5.- Figure 1 is not clearit,  is not illustrative enough.

 

 

 

1. What is the main question addressed by the research?

COMPARISON AGRO AND FOREST-SUSTAINABILITY OF COLD HIGH MOUNTAIN IN HIMALAYA

2. Do you consider the topic original or relevant in the field? Does it address a specific gap in the field?

YES, BECAUSE THE STUDY INCLUDED AGROSYSTEMS AND NATURAL HIGH COLD MOUNTAIN ECOSISTEMS

3. What does it add to the subject area compared with other published material?

a VERY SPECIAL COLD ECOSISTEMS

4. What specific improvements should the authors consider regarding the methodology? What further controls should be considered?

COMPARISON BETWEEM NORTH AND SUB SLOPES

5. Are the conclusions consistent with the evidence and arguments presented and do they address the main question posed?

YES

6. Are the references appropriate?

YES

7. Please include any additional comments on the tables and figures.

TABLES 1-6 COULD BE TRANSFORM IN A ANNEX

ALTITUDE VALUES COULD BE INCLUDED FOR EACH LOCALITIES

FIGURE 1 COULD BE IMPROVED

Author Response

Response to the comments of reviewer-2

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

General comments

In general, the document is well structured and written. The objectives seem clear, although incomplete, and the presentation of the results is profuse to adequately support the conclusions of the work. In particular, I see very favorably the novelty of studying an area little documented in the international literature. I learned a lot by getting to know this high mountain ecosystem and I consider it to be an adequate and pertinent contribution to the journal.

However, I consider that the study is idiosyncratic as it is exclusively descriptive and comparative without a socio-ecological basis. In my opinion, it needs to better express the logic behind the authors' interest in comparing four locations that are in different altitudinal conditions. Beyond describing the similarities/dissimilarities in the composition and structure of the vegetation, what is the premise in comparing ecologically contrasting conditions? From the outset, some of us could infer that altitudinal differences are sufficient to anticipate differences in vegetation, but the authors do not mention as a prediction what was expected to be found based on prior knowledge in these high mountain ecosystems. That is, are the four sites expected to share equally diversity and structural parameters?, are forest and agroforestry systems floristically simpler than natural forest fragments? What is the proportion of native vs. non-native species expected among the three types of environments? What is the predicted variation in the richness of woody species along the elevational gradient?, what is the influence of social factors vs. ecological factors in determining the use of certain species in agroforestry systems? Thera are several other questions that remain open considering documenting the sustainability of ways of life in the Cold Desert Environments.

The whole paper would benefit from being more concise if instead of using text to idiosyncratically describe each ecological condition. Also, some more synthetic figures could be used, e.g. true diversity using the Hill numbers (see comment below)

 

Specific comments

Introduction and methods

Good balance between information and description of the socio-environmental context. Towards the end of the section, a description of the rationale behind the description of these systems would be very welcome to better guide the presentation of the results.

Lines 79-80 I don't understand what they mean by the expression "physiographic vegetation", I suppose that it can refer to the influence of physiographic factors that determine a characteristic type of vegetation, but I prefer that they explain it. In my opinion, any type of vegetation reflects the physiographic characteristics differentially distributed throughout the planet, so I do not understand the annotation as a unique process in this type of high mountain dry vegetation.

Lines 127-128 Change the expression “…yet systematic study on vegetation analysis have not been studied” with this other “…yet systematic study on vegetation analysis have not been carried out”

Line 252. Please correct the symbol “×” which should not be in superscript (10m2 × 10m2)

Lines 274-275 Clarify if the basal area was used as a measure of dominance, since in this paragraph they are mentioned as two separate variables. In fact, for the calculation of the index value of importance, it would be expected that the relative values of density, frequency and dominance (basal area) were used.

Lines 288-296, Please correct the correct notation of diversity indices. Currently the eqn. 1 and eqn. 2 are identical. Apart from these analyses, I suggest considering the option of presenting the diversity analyzes using Hill numbers (^qD), which allows the results to be expressed in terms of the effective number of species. See iNEXT (Chao et al. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst. 2014. 45:297–324; Hsieh & Chao, Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2016, 7, 1451–1456)

In all Tables, I suggest consulting the IPNI page (https://www.ipni.org/) to correct the accepted notation for each of the species mentioned. There are several inconsistencies, for example: Prunus prostrata Labill. Parrotopsis jacquemontiana (should be in italics), Prunus jacquemontii Hook. F., Ribes grossularia L., etc. Similarly, in all tables, the footnote is unnecessary, it is understood that species absences have no numerical value for any site. As the same time, in Tables 1 and 3, columns 2-5 do not have information for the Khoksar locality; it is not justified to put columns without data, so, the alternative is simply to indicate in the header of the tables that there is no information for the Khoksar locality and eliminate such columns in these Tables.

 

Results and discussion

Both sections could be more concrete if a hierarchical relationship of social, economic, ecological factors is presented, which are related to the composition and structure of the vegetation in the Cold Desert environments.

 

Conclusions

This is where a bit is mentioned about the sustainability aspects of vegetation management, which I believe makes this contribution viable for the purpose of the special issue of the journal. I believe that this is the critical path that should have been followed to explain the purpose of the paper. I suggest that, from this perspective, the premises that support or not the sustainability of vegetation management in the cold desert environments be included since the introduction.

Author Response

Response to the comments of reviewer-3

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

This article can be accepted in the current form.

Understandable