A System Dynamics Model Examining Alternative Wildfire Response Policies

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

see attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for the helpful comments and suggestions. Please see attached document with detailed responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting topic that deals with the impact of alternative fire management strategies on specified targets. Such work with direct and clear links back to management is important for the area of fire science. Unfortunately, the manuscript was difficult to follow and had a confusing flow. Of greatest concern is the lack of a basic statistical analysis to support claims made.

Major issues

Abstract

The abstract is confusing and contains many long sentences with awkward phrasing. There are a number of jargon phrases such as “hot and slow” and “fire paradox” which need explaining, especially to an international audience.

Introduction

The authors do a good job at explaining some background into the topic and some of the current research in the area. However, the writing style is poor. Listing authors then their research does not display adequate understanding of the links and themes of current research. Clear aims would allow the reader to better follow the rest of the paper.

Methods

Methods should follow the introduction (not the results)- see Systems author guidelines.

For an international audience, slightly more information on Landfire would be beneficial. Throughout the paper it was unclear whether the fire that was referred to was prescribed fire or wildfire. This is a key component of the work so should be clear from the abstract, but a description is lacking. 

Lines 357-366: The concept of flows needs to be clarified in the paper. Regarding the addition of uncharacteristic flows to the model, some more information of how these were derived is necessary e.g. field data, estimates?

Figure labels throughout the methods and the paper need to stand alone from the in-text explanation.

The clarity of methods could potentially be improved with more subtitles.

Results

I would suggest restructuring the results to emphasise the question or idea being tested in each paragraph rather than relying on explaining each figure or table in turn.

All figures should have axis labels for clarity.

I would also question the lack of a statistical analysis. Simply quoting means and visualising patterns does not necessarily indicate a statistical or ecologically significant result. Even a simple analysis using confidence intervals would improve validity of the manuscript e.g. (Walshe, et al. 2007)

Walshe, T., Wintle, B., Fidler, F. and Burgman, M. 2007. Use of confidence intervals to demonstrate performance against forest management standards. - Forest Ecology and Management 247: 237-245.

Author Response

Thanks for the helpful comments and suggestions. Please see the attached document for detailed responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I've included a few further comments in the attached.  This includes a few small recommendations. I regard these as options for the authors to decide to include or not. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for all the comments and suggestions. We adopted all recommendations for edits to text, including the modification to Figure 1 to differentiate management from ecological effects. We also added much more context regarding on-the-ground fire management, including a new figure, that we think addresses some of the requests for more operational detail.

Reviewer 2 Report

General comments

Now that the authors have made it clear that they are talking about wildfire policy, they need to explain the concept behind the paper much more clearly. It is unclear how the different wildfire ‘policies’ would be implemented, how they are relevant to management and if they are even possible. There appears to be the assumption that aggressive suppression stops all wildfires, which is not true across the US nor internationally. Acknowledging the simplification of the modelling process, I fail to understand how such a study could be framed in a management framework when extent of wildfire cannot be determined year on year in this modelling technique. Management cannot change the rate of wildfire to the degree the authors have suggested, and this study provides no information on how wildfire would be managed in this way. 

I would suggest the authors must either make the premise of this paper much more explicit or remove the management angle altogether and instead focus on the ecological changes to forest succession under different wildfire scenarios.

Specific comments

Abstract

Line 11. A primary motivation is to exploring the implications of expanding the pace and scale of using wildfire as a forest restoration tool.

This sentence is written poorly. Please rewrite so your message is clear and easily understood.

Introduction

The use of acronyms throughout this paper is confusing and unnecessary. E.g. please write succession class rather than s-class.

Line 81- As the burn rate decreases (reflective of a fire exclusion management paradigm), forest density increases.

This is a large assumption and is not true in all ecosystems. Please include a reference to back up the statement from your study ecosystem.

Methods

Further justification of the study area is required.

Line 153- why did you have a fuel accumulation multiplier? I presume the value was already set and justified in LANDFIRE. 

Line 163- Further justification required on why you used a continuous rate rather than the state transitions based on probabilistic disturbances and deterministic (time-dependent) natural succession. You appear to be move further away from reality by using this approach.

Results

Line 290- “Perhaps most notable is the difference between the simulated steady state (SS) after 2000 years with a 10 year return interval (see Appendix A), in the leftmost column, and the SQ policy in the next column.”

If this result is important, it should not be in the appendix. 

Line 292 – “Results generally confirm patterns evident from Table 6, for example the high degree of departure from the SQ policy (969.35 ha), which has the highest levels of S-Classes B, E, UNB, and UNE, and the lowest levels of S-Classes C and D.”

Firstly, this is not a sentence and the number of acronyms is incredibly confusing. You will lose most readers if you retain sentences like this.

Figures 5 6 7

These figures shouldn’t have titles but clear figure captions. The y-axis on all these figures should be specific to the figure, i.e. include the succession state the axis refers to.

Figure text is still too small.

Section 3.2 policy resistance.

This whole concept needs to be clearer, I would suggest removing it for clarity as I do not think it adds significant information to the paper, at least in its current form.

Discussion

Unless the premise of the paper is more clearly defined, the discussion should not focus on the management application, but on the ecological changes to forest succession under different wildfire scenarios.

Author Response

Please see attachment for specific comments. We appreciate the critique and think it has forced us to better contextualize and justify our study, which is an overall improvement.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to thank the authors for taking on my feedback. I believe the paper now reads much more clearly and I am happy to recommend it be accepted in it's present form. 

Author Response

Thanks, we really appreciate the detailed comments and think the paper is much better as a result