Opportunities and Threats of Mediterranean Evergreen Sclerophyllous Woody Species Subjected to Extreme Drought Events
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I find this review very useful and well-elaborated, with clear arguments and sufficient justification for the conclusions. I have just minor comments, but I think that the manuscript can be published almost in its present form (just: not being a native speaker, I do not dare to criticize other one’s English, but I feel that here a linguistic check would be useful).
Minor comments
l. 63 The opinions about the relationship between sclerophylly and drought are not so unanimous, see Salleo et al. (1997) New Phytol, Alonso-Forn et al. (2020) Curr For Rep etc.
l. 97 resistance to drought extremes is of course related primarily to xylem properties; the issue is whether xylem properties are not related to sclerophylly, and the citation [31] indicates that such association may exist.
l. 121 “Mediterranean climate originated in the Quaternary” – it would be good to document this by some citation, e.g. Cheng et al. (2014) Sci Rep
Table 1 “Tertiary” (not “Terziary”
l. 187 ff. put species names in italics.
l. 197 explain the abbreviation NSC at the first occurrence, not at l. 221
l. 208, 248 the term ‘agamic’ is typically used for regeneration by apomictically produced seeds, here ‘vegetative regeneration’ would fit better
l. 208 I wonder what means ‘resprouting’ in this context: formation of root suckers (i.e. from roots), or formation of coppice sprouts (i.e. from stems or rests of stems)? Are these two types of vegetative regeneration physiologically equivalent?
l. 267 I did not get the sense of this sentence – do the authors suggest an East-to-West transfer of genetic materials? And is any assisted migration necessary, when we talk here of maquis (not forests; here the sole existence of soil cover is of practical importance, not the commercial value), containing woody species capable to survive under future warmer and drier climates?
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper by Bussotti and Pollastrini entitled "Winners and losers among Mediterranean evergreen sclerophyllous woody species subjected to extreme drought events in SW Europe”, submitted for Applied Science journal, brings many important information on phylogenetic and evolutionary basis of the resistance to drought of Mediterranean vegetation and its possible mechanisms of resilience. The article is a kind of summary of many different studies on this topic, in a very wide range - from biochemical research, through plant ecology, to the history of the evolution of individual taxa and ecosystems. I propose only a few changes to the article submitted for review. I have read it with great interest and the only thing I can tell is that it seems chaotic in some parts - but this is due to the wide range of issues covered and as a non-native I am not able to suggest any other wording for some paragraphs (look e.g. at line 163 „by [58] by” or line 167-168).
I have only some minor remarks, which should be considered by Authors:
- I found some typos e.g.
Line 115 „aere” should be „are”
Table 1 „Terziary” should be „Tertiary”’; „Arbutus undo” should be „Arbutus unedo”, „subsp. Europaea” should be „subsp. europaea”; „Tetraclinis articolata” should be „Tetraclinis auriculata”
Line 152 „specie” should be „species”
- Line 160-172 should be justified not centred
- Some species names should be in italics, not normal (see line 185, 187, 188-189, 202)
- Line 253 – I do not understand a short „sp.pl.” It means „sp. dif.”?
- I also don't know if starting a sentence with a number in square brackets doesn't make it difficult to read the text. So, I would suggest starting with the name of the cited author, as follows:
- Line 32 „Tognetti et al. [30]”
- Line 115 „Blumler [20] and Givnish [37]”
- Line 148 „Peñuelas et al [51]”
- Line 196 „Rosas et al [69]”
- Line 223 „He et al [77]”
- Line 231 „Barbeta and Peñuelas [78]”
- Line 236 and line 240 „Galiano et al. [79]”
- Line 239 „López et al. [80]”
Finally - I am not sure if the title of the paper fully reflects its content. It suggests that the reader will receive fairly precise information on the topic of winners and losers in the rank of individual species, while most of the considerations are really only about of four of them. Of course, we can guess that the evergreen species will be more likely to die during prolonged periods of drought, but the article also shows that they may have a greater possibility of resprouting. At this point, I have run out of information on the resprouting possibility of deciduous species, so the issue of the macchia woody plant species composition in the future is still not clear. So, in my opinion, the suggested answers are therefore ambiguous, and the article should have a less explicit title. Maybe "Opportunities and threats of Mediterranean evergreen sclerophyllous woody species subjected to extreme drought events” or something like this? The fact that the Mediterranean region is within SE Europe, should be obvious to all scholarly readers, I am sure.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
