bigger picture changes

[teixeirak]

Recording some suggestions from coauthors:

more emphasis on the ecology

• [x] change title to one with a more ecological focus? (drafted.)
• [x] change abstract to a more ecological focus (drafted new version. changes aren't huge.)
• [x] restructure intro around ecology rather than methods (not too difficult-- see annotations in draft)
• [x] create table summarizing key ecological hypotheses/ predictions/ results (started, but it needs more work)

clearer balance of methods vs ecology

• [x] My suggestion would be to include a dedicated section to describing the steps of the approach, basically describing the workflow that you present in Figures 1 and 2, which could be referenced in that section. (I think the methods is probably best essentially as is, but I've broken out a dedicated section in the results about validating the method.)
• [x] use the many species/ sites to prove that the method is needed (the new hypothesis table should do this)

present a less overwhelming amount of info

• [x] remove SI figures; instead present via GitHub (covered in issues #118, #130)
• [x] reduce content on variation with DBH? (maybe not... some coauthors really liked that content, and I got one comment from an audience member of my talk that our results on DBH are quite important.)

other

• [x] remove overlap between intro and discussion

[teixeirak]

@ValentineHerr , it would be great if you could take a look at what I'm planning before I get in too deep into the revisions. I've made some changes and annotations in the manuscript to indicate what I plan to do, and I'm also tracking some of these above.

[ValentineHerr]

Sorry, I didn't get a chance to look at this yesterday...

I like the new title! For the intro, I agree that you can cut most of the paragraph starting with "Dendrochronological methods". Keeping something equivalent to the last 2 sentences of that paragraph seems enough. I think the new table 1 and how you broke out the validation of the methods out in the results are great improvements. For the DBH, keeping most of the content about it seems right.... Being able to use DBH is one of the key point of this new methods and it seems to be what ca-authors/audience remembers the most.

Let me know if there something more specific you'd like me to review.

[teixeirak]

Thanks! Glad you like the changes. I'm working on it and will follow up later.

[teixeirak]

Intro content

from JM:

This point of time windows is a bit buried to some extent but is a big component of the results. I wonder if adding a sentence about the timing of climate sensitivity and changes in that timing in the introduction could be useful.

Thinking of citations that used standard dendro data to look at some of this:

Maxwell, R. S., Belmecheri, S., Taylor, A. H., Davis, K. J., & Ocheltree, T. W. (2020). Carbon isotope ratios in tree rings respond differently to climatic variations than tree-ring width in a mesic temperate forest. Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, 288, 108014.

Gao, S., Liu, R., Zhou, T., Fang, W., Yi, C., Lu, R., ... & Luo, H. (2018). Dynamic responses of tree‐ring growth to multiple dimensions of drought. Global Change Biology, 24(11), 5380-5390.

D'Orangeville, L., Maxwell, J., Kneeshaw, D., Pederson, N., Duchesne, L., Logan, T., ... & Phillips, R. P. (2018). Drought timing and local climate determine the sensitivity of eastern temperate forests to drought. Global Change Biology, 24(6), 2339-2351.

Kannenberg, S. A., Maxwell, J. T., Pederson, N., D'Orangeville, L., Ficklin, D. L., & Phillips, R. P. (2019). Drought legacies are dependent on water table depth, wood anatomy and drought timing across the eastern US. Ecology Letters, 22(1), 119-127.

[teixeirak]

Points to highlight:

• "When a precipitation variable, a temperature variable, and DBH were all included as candidate variables in the GLS models, typically all three were included in the top model, regardless of the growth metric used" - PZ: This is a key result: so far, dendro analyses have mostly not (been able to) assess(ed) these additive effects of multiple climatic variables.
• frequency of DBH x climate interactions: PZ- " I think this is a key result, that could/should be flashed out prominently in Discussion and Abstract. This is a nice contribution to the field. "

[teixeirak]

from PZ, regarding DBH trends: I’d remove this .. not really news