teixeirak
commented
3 years ago - [x] I’ve gone through the ms and the rebuttal and made some suggested edits & comments in the former related to random effects. These figure prominently in discussion on sampling/analysis biases, but the ms currently lacks information on whether models with random effects were retained (I may have missed it ...). I think it would be important to include some information on this, to show/illustrate that/how this works.
- [x] One final comment on the mortality comment by reviewer 2 (“This point should be addressed- the article presents the relationship between growth and climate only for the surviving trees. How does excluding growth data from the analysis potentially bias the results?”). I think the reviewer is asking whether relations hold if all trees (also the dead ones) were included. Part of the sampling biases are about missing trees (slow-growing trees not surviving juvenile phase; fast-growing trees dying big but young), so we can refer to that part of the discussion. It’s also worthwhile to mention that a full understanding of this could only be obtained if dead trees would also be sampled, which (I think) was not the case. An example of such as study is in the DeSoto 2020 Nature Comm paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14300-5), although this focused on drought responses.
[x] The new figure is very nice. For Cedar Breaks, all the trees we cored really would have established 200 years ago or more. The 100+ is of course accurate, and the SI includes the date of the last fire, but I can’t help but think of a tree of only 100 years as just a sapling! It might be better to say something like “the majority of trees >10 cm DBH (or some other diameter) established before 1900’. Because of course at Cedar Breaks the largest number of trees are ankle-biter subalpine fir that are <5 cm DBH.
[x] One of the Birch et al. chronologies isn’t currently in the citations of the main text (ABBI). Birch, J. D., R. J. DeRose, and J. A. Lutz. 2020. Abies bifolia (ABBI) tree-ring chronology for Cedar Breaks National Monument. International Tree-Ring Data Bank, IGBP PAGES/World Data Center for Paleoclimatology, NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program, Boulder, Colorado, USA. ABBI - ITRDB UT545.