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PONE-D-20-37882

On the general relationship between plant height and aboveground biomass of vegetation stands in contrasted ecosystems

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Proulx,

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.

Specific Editor's comments:

As early as in 1902, Eichhorn discovered that stand volume production is a function of stand height only, i.e. the standing volume of a species at a specific stand height is the same across different sites (i.e. different environmental conditions). Later on, several authors, including prof. Assmann, confirmed the hypothesis. You may also read a review by Skovsgaard and Vanclay 2008 (https://doi.org/10.1093/forestry/cpm041). Although, the hypothesis of the biomass packing is indeed interesting, the hypothesis that the majority of the variation in aboveground standing biomas is explained by stand height is by far not knew.

Assmann E. Die Bedeutung des “erweiterten Eichhorn’schen Gesetzes” für die Konstruktion von Fichten-Ertragstafeln, Forstwiss. Centralbl., 1955, vol. 74 (pg. 321-330)

Eichhorn F. , Ertragstafeln für die Weistanne, 1902 Berlin, Verlag von Julius, Springer

J. P. Skovsgaard, J. K. Vanclay, Forest site productivity: a review of the evolution of dendrometric concepts for even-aged stands, Forestry: An International Journal of Forest Research, Volume 81, Issue 1, January 2008, Pages 13–31

Please, check if the structure of your manuscript, including reference style, follows criteria of PLOS ONE journal. For example, the section Material and Methods goes before Results, etc.

Please, clearly define the methods used - see comments of reviewers.

In addition, clarify the definition of stand height - mean, upper, top. If top, what is the percentage of trees to form top stand layer. Which variable (DBH, tree height or volume) was used to sort trees in the stand and to calculate the stand height (irrelevant if just the average height of trees was calculated)?

Any study published should be 100% reproducible, so please, provide all details of your methodology.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 22 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're 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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Michal Bosela, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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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

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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 manuscript under consideration shows that biomass packing maintains constant values across contrasted ecosystems being practically insignificant the effect of climate or site variables such as air temperature, species richness or soil fertility on aboveground stocks.

The paper sets interesting research questions. It should be of general interest to the readers of the journal. However, I consider that some minor corrections should be made before publication.

Abstract

Line 23. According to Fig. S1 biomass packing clusters around 0.6 kg m-3

Results

Lines 86-107. The theoretical underpinning is not a result of the analyzed data, but the equations that show the geometric relationships between the studied variables. I believe that these paragraphs should be placed in the introduction or in the methodology.

Fig. 1. It would be convenient to mark the points with a different color according to the database from which they originate (Western US prairies, Central Germany managed grasslands and Canadian forests).

Discusion

When the three different datasets are compared together, the slope of the AB-H relationship shown in Fig. 1 is close to 1. However, this figure also shows that, if each ecosystem is analyzed separately, this slope varies. For example, if we focus on the points belonging to the forest ecosystems, the slope is clearly greater than 1 and is apparently not linear. These discrepancies, between the general model and the results when we scale down and focus on a single ecosystem, should be discussed.

According to Fig. S1 the mean BP in the three types of ecosystems analyzed is very similar, close to 0.6. However in previous work (Proulx et al. 2015, DOI 10.7717/peerj.849) you analyze other ecosystems where the mean BP varies considerably. If ecosystems with very different BP values had been chosen for the study, would the same conclusions hold? Please discuss..

Methods

To see the analyses performed, it is necessary to go to the figure captions. Please specify in Methods section the statistical analyses that have been performed.

Please, show in a table the fitted equations with coefficients and p-values of each variable.

Specifies the software used and, if R software has been used, the specific package.

Lines 189-190: "Forest stands with a biomass below 1 kg m-2 were excluded". However, in Fig. 1 it seems that forest stands with less than 2 or 3 kg m-2 are missing.

Reviewer #2: The manuscript is presenting information to confirm those showed previously by Proulx et al (2015, PeerJ) about biomass packing, but now he was using an allometric approach.

The approach of testing the hypothesis of slope coefficient =1.00 for the relationship between aboveground biomass and height for different ecosystems (prairies, grasslands and forests) is supported by the difference between them and the high number of cases. But, from a rigorous point of view, the affirmation that the slope coefficient did not deviate from 1.00 (L74-75) need to be reconsidered as the CI were not including the 1.00 value. The same comment for the relationship between IAB and VV, from a rigorous statistic point of view the CI were not including the 1.00 value and in my opinion the sentence should be rewritten.

Moreover, I miss the inclusion of multilayer ecosystems as, for example, tropical ecosystems. In those ecosystems, trees shrub and herbaceous layer are existing together.

Figure 1 is showing the biomass-height relationship, but there is gap of data between 1 to 5/6 m height that could be cover by other ecosystem type (e.g., shrubs, or ecosystem with trees in a young development stage). It would be very suitable to present a continuous dataset for this relationship in order to improve the applicability of the results.

L155: Following Poorter et al. (2015, New Phytol), leaf mass fraction is an important biomass compartment. From their data, leaf mass in a tree about 100 kg could be between 7-8% of the aboveground biomass. So, I suggest to consider this sentence accordingly to the comment.

Minor comments:

L56-57 and L178-179: The order to present the different datasets are the opposite that showed in Table 1.

L75-76: the values that you were showing are not the same (at least they did not correspond each other) that showed in L308-309 (S1 Fig)

L137: I suggest: ‘of an individual plant stem scales near isometrically with its vital volume’

L145-146. It was also found that allometric scaling exponents were not always fixed and they vary with plant size (Poorter et al., 2015, New Phytol)

L153-154: I don’t think that the process of leaf out for deciduous trees when light and air temperature decrease should be considered as an example of environmental stress or disturbance.

L185: Following table 1 it should be ‘810 forest stands’

L190: The value that you presented ‘biomass below 1 kg m-2’ are not the same that showed in table 1

L280-283. The panels in figure 2 are not in the order that is presented in these lines. There is not panel for ‘age’, but you were showing a panel for ‘annual mean temperature’. Now, I have doubts about the order about the ecosystems as I would think that for number of legumes it should be for grasslands or prairies, N addition for grassland or prairies and annual mean temperature for forests. Please, you should check it deeply.

L285-286. In the Fig 2 (right panels) you were showing the biomass packing where the dashed line indicates the 1 kg m-3 packing. But in your analysis (line73) you presented that the biomass packing intercept was 0.62 kg m-3, and also in S1 Fig the mean values for the different ecosystems were different that 1.00 value. Was it a mistake and you changed to the scaling exponent? Please, it should be clarify.

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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.]

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PONE-D-20-37882R1

On the general relationship between plant height and aboveground biomass of vegetation stands in contrasted ecosystems

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Proulx,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that your manuscript can be acceptd for publication after minor revision. Please, consider a few final suggestions by Reviewer #1. I strongly encourage you to consider the suggestion of Reviewer #1 to add regression lines for each of the ecosystems separatelly in Figure 1 to see how the general trend applies for individual ecosystems. Beside this, your manuscript now reads well and can be accepted for publication.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 31 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're 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.

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). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Michal Bosela, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. 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

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. 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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. 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

**********

6. 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: In general the authors have adequately addressed my comments. However, I would like the authors to analyze and discuss the pattern that BP follows within each ecosystem. Although it is not essential for the article, and if the editor does not consider it necessary this comment can be omitted, I think it would be very interesting to know if the general trend shown in Figure 1 holds true if each of the ecosystems is considered separately. In other words: with the data analyzed, it can be stated that BP remains constant between ecosystems but, does it also remain constant within each ecosystem? According to the graph it seems that it does not, especially in forests.

Reviewer #2: I appreciate the effort of the author to solve those points that could be less clear in the manuscript. You followed most of the suggestions from the Editor and reviewer comments and the document was enhanced. With the changes made, I think that the manuscript is ready for publishing now.

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7. 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.]

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 PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

On the general relationship between plant height and aboveground biomass of vegetation stands in contrasted ecosystems

PONE-D-20-37882R2

Dear Dr. Proulx,

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

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Michal Bosela, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: