Line-specific comments

[Aariq]

Some line-specific comments are included in other issues. These are the uncategorized or miscellaneous ones.

R1: "I had a hard time linking these statements in the results to the figures."

• [x] L331 – 332 – How can you see in this figure that the response is ‘more muted as indicated by the shape of the crossbasis function’?

R2:

• [x] Line 51-52. I find this sentence confusing. What specific demographic mechanisms are you referring to? Do you mean that high mortality rate lead to extinction and we don’t know what causes high mortality rates?
• [x] Line 146. Can you explain what you mean with “the height of each plant to the tallest leaf”? If the tallest leaf is growing more horizontally the height of the plant would be shorter than the length of the largest leaf?
• [x] Line 277-278: I don’t see in Figure 3a that the impact of size on growth was greatest for mid-sized plants in continuous forest. It looks to me that the 1-ha and CF lines are extremely close together and not statistically different. Perhaps you can say that there is a tendency of small plants having a larger growth in fragments while large plants grow slightly more in CF.
• [x] Lines 287-289. While this statement is true, there are also years where flowering is lower in CF (e.g., 2002 similar values as following the drought in 2003 in fragments). I feel that the reporting of the results is a bit biased towards concluding that plants do worse in fragments compared to CF, especially since none of the result reported so far are significant.
• [x] Line 301-301: This is somewhat misleading because as you describe later SPEI at time lags 15-20 and 32-36 are significant also. I wonder if it might be better to describe the entire Fig 4b and then the entire Fig 4a. What springs to my mind is that the area that is significant is much larger in in fragments compared to CF. It seems that in CF only a few months are significant. Surprisingly they fall not consistently in the dry or wet season.
• [x] 16) Lines 437-438 change “starting expand” with “starting to expand”

R3:

• [x] #91
• [x] Line 166 - given the shallow roots, why not use 1 month SPEI and let the model do the smoothing over longer time frames? You describe why not using longer smooths, but not shorter.

[Aariq]

"height of the tallest leaf" just means the height to the tallest point of the plant, right @embruna?