PONE-D-19-21151

Ecohydrology of urban trees under passive and active irrigation in a semiarid city

PLOS ONE

Dear Mr. Luketich,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

We would appreciate receiving your revised manuscript by Oct 21 2019 11:59PM. When you are ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter.

To enhance the reproducibility of your results, we recommend that if applicable you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io, where a protocol can be assigned its own identifier (DOI) such that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). This letter should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. This file should be uploaded as separate file and labeled 'Manuscript'.

Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Zhihua Wang, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and http://www.journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. We note that Figures in your submission contain map/satellite images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright.

We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission:

1.    You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figures to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. 

We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text:

“I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.”

Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an "Other" file with your submission.

In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].”

2.    If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only.

The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful:

USGS National Map Viewer (public domain): http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (public domain): http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/

Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cia-maps-publications/index.html

NASA Earth Observatory (public domain): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

Landsat: http://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/

USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observatory and Science (EROS) Center) (public domain): http://eros.usgs.gov/#

Natural Earth (public domain): http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

**********

3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The paper is an experimental study on the impact of passive and active irrigation on urban trees. The experiment is well designed and the approach is scientifically sound. Overall the paper is well written and the results are clearly discussed. I only have minor comments:

1) For calculating the Sap velocity, Equation (2) seems to be an empirical relation. Please provide necessary references or clarifications.

2) Figure 6, the R2 values are quite small in some cases, are these linear relationships statistically significant?

3) As this is an experimental study, photos showing the actual in-situ instruments are highly preferred.

4) It might be worthy to include some references on urban irrigation in semi-arid environment, such as Yang and Wang 2015 Optimizing urban irrigation schemes for the trade-off between energy and water consumption, Volo et al. 2015 An ecohydrological approach to conserving urban water through optimized landscape irrigation schedules.

Reviewer #2: Article Review:

Ecohydrology of urban trees under passive and active irrigation in a semiarid city

Recommendation:

Major Revision

General comments:

In the manuscript, the authors used controlled experiment to understand how passive and active irrigation influenced urban trees in the semi-arid city. The overall research and experimental design are complete, and the data analysis and results provide useful insights to the existing literature. However, I would recommend the authors further improve all the figures quality to better support your explanation and revisit the regression analysis to make sure it explains well to the readers. A few typos and grammar errors need to be fixed as well. More detailed comments can be found in the specific comments.

Specific comments:

L48: Can you explain what types of ecosystem services are provided by the green infrastructure? This is too general. Some useful literature is attached here:

Yang, J., & Wang, Z.-H. (2017). Planning for a sustainable desert city: The potential water buffering capacity of urban green infrastructure. Landscape and Urban Planning, 167, 339–347. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2017.07.014

Zhao, Q., Yang, J., Wang, Z.-H., & Wentz, E. (2018). Assessing the Cooling Benefits of Tree Shade by an Outdoor Urban Physical Scale Model at Tempe, AZ. Urban Science, 2(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci2010004

Tzoulas, K., Korpela, K., Venn, S., Yli-Pelkonen, V., Kaźmierczak, A., Niemela, J., & James, P. (2007). Promoting ecosystem and human health in urban areas using Green Infrastructure: A literature review. Landscape and Urban Planning, 81(3), 167–178. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2007.02.001

L53: change “select” to “selected”

L81: similar?? Need more explanation.

L85-87:

Research goals need to be a bit clear. You only say this research applies a framework to the system, which is not very clear. Can you better describe your research objective?

L95: You would also like to explain in one sentence about how your research will contribute to the literature and real-world practise.

L112: Can you make the climate data website as a reference?

L122: What is the highlight for?

L188: Normalized greenness value is more accurate. Normalized value is too general.

L205: Where here is the data analysis section? I don’t understand.

L221: medians of what?

L235-237: What is the p-value here?

L277: change R to R2

L278: the? Or they?

Table 1:

You use acronym quite frequently in your manuscript, such as PI and AI. Please make sure you explain it when it first shows up in the manuscript. Please check all your acronym again.

You might want to change the word “slope” to “coefficient”

Many of your R2 results are very low, and it almost shows no relationship. Also, can you add the p-value for your simple linear regression models?

Although you only have one parameter, you also need to explain what your dependent variable is and what is your independent variable.

I don’t understand your GE part, did you run a linear regression as well here?

Figure:

Two general problems:

1. Figure dpi is too low. You need to increase the figure resolution to at least 300 dpi

2. Figure caption is too long. You can either add them into the main text or make it as a legend in the figure.

Figure 2:

Figure (a) and (b) is quite a crude map. Can you add a city boundary for Tucson? Figure (a) can be a very small inset map next to Figure (b).

You can see an example in the Figure 1 of the listed reference:

Zhao, Q., Yang, J., Wang, Z.-H., & Wentz, E. (2018). Assessing the Cooling Benefits of Tree Shade by an Outdoor Urban Physical Scale Model at Tempe, AZ. Urban Science, 2(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/urbansci2010004

Can you highlight the trail in the figure (c)? That will give reader a better idea.

Figure (d) and (e):

Why don't you use different name for active and passive irrigation site?

Figure 3: I saw there are some gaps in the VWC in 2017 (similar in Figure 5) and LAI in the late 2018. Why does it happen? Does the gap influence the analysis results?

Figure 6: I would recommend to separate summer and spring figures to make the x-axis clearer. And it looks like you have different intervals for your x-axis, I would recommend using the same interval for all the figures.

Figure 7: you will need a legend for this figure, especially when you have different symbols in the same figures.

**********

6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files to be viewed.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email us at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Review-PONE.pdf

Ecohydrology of urban trees under passive and active irrigation in a semiarid city

PONE-D-19-21151R1

Dear Dr. Luketich,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it complies with all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you will receive an e-mail containing information on the amendments required prior to publication. When all required modifications have been addressed, you will receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will proceed to our production department and be scheduled for publication.

Shortly after the formal acceptance letter is sent, an invoice for payment will follow. To ensure an efficient production and billing process, please log into Editorial Manager at https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the "Update My Information" link at the top of the page, and update your user information. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, you must inform our press team as soon as possible and no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

With kind regards,

Zhihua Wang, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: