integrate coauthor feedback

[teixeirak]

Edit from Ian I'm going to make the overall list of major comments I can't answer here, so they're easier to parse through.

General

• [x] Bill doesn't like the term "suffer" (I see the point, but note that we used it in Bennett et al title and have never received any pushback on that.)

Title

• [x] 28. Lawren suggests including growth rings because it's novel, such that the title would be "The influence of hydraulic traits on temperate tree drought responses resolved in their growth rings."

• [x] KAT thinks the title should contain broadleaf or deciduous, but not both. Either works, although "broadleaf" links a little better to leaf traits.

Summary

• [x] 1. Alan: A couple things to consider: (1) Did you look at growth rate (raw growth rate or BAI, not standardized RWI) prior to the drought? The pre-drought growth rate might be a better predictor of drought response than height or leaf-level physiological traits. I would expect pre-drought growth rate to integrate some of the other characteristics. (2) Is there an easy way to look at local neighborhood competition since the trees are mapped? I would expect local competition and pre-drought growth rate to be important drivers of drought response, but maybe not for trees that are already taller than most/all of the competing trees.

• [x] 2. Erika suggests spelling out the best predictor traits despite the next bullet point.

• [x] 3. Erika is of the opinion that broadleaf should not be included here, instead using "deciduous". She also added deciduous to the title. I'm unsure if this is redundant**

• [x] KAT: in 3rd bullet point, change "soil water availability" to "root water access". This is a key distinction between TWI (sig effect) and TWI*size (n.s.).

• [x] 29. Lawren suggested the last sentence here be deleted and replaced with "Yet, the influence of tree size and species’ traits on tree growth during drought has remained unclear. The dendrochronological record provides a window through which to test key hypotheses." I'm including this as a comment because I don't have a good reason for either incorporating or disregarding this.

• [x] 30. Lawren: "Not too solid a conclusion, given the extrapolative correlative approach here… suggest to clarify and solidify [by saying this instead]":

• We conclude that hydraulic traits and tree height influences growth responses during drought, and can explain variation in the tree ring record spanning historical droughts. Thus, these traits can be useful for predicting future droughts under climate change.

Intro

• [x] 4. Nobby says this intro is based too much on Bennet 2015. I'm not sure if he means we should remove some of the citations or rephrase some sentences.

• [x] 5. Alan gives another mechanism here from another paper; I'm unsure how you want to consolidate that with this sentence.

I'd place this with traits; this paper is now cited after the statement "a final mechanism that could mediate tree size-related responses to drought is how hydraulic traits are distributed with respect to size"

• [x] 6. For this previous sentence, Alan questions whether this assumption can be made, and Valentine says it's odd to come back to Bennett as a ref here.

• [x] 7. Valentine is confused if you mean to say "lack of" these things. Alan points out we should define these terms here since is the first time they're used. Unsure what your thoughts are on that

• [x] 8. Valentine says take this part (italicized) out. I think it's fine to take out since it will read better, but unsure if you had reason to keep in

• [x] 9. Nobby says repetitive to use bennett and stovall again here. Erika suggested 2 sources but I don't think they work.

I disagree that its repetitive. This is a separate point from larger trees suffering more; there also appears to be an interaction with drought strength.

• [x] 10. Erika suggests to name the ecoregion. I'm not sure what it is

• [x] 11. Alan says that root water access refers to info inferred from both TWI and root structure, which we don't have. Thus he suggests only saying soil water availability throughout the paper. I agree and will change this (putting this here so you know).

• [x] 12. Erika adds a source here (rv about root literature), but it wouldn't go here. Unsure if you want to use it https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2015.00547/full

• [x] 31. Lawren's comment here basically sums up most of his edits for the intro. Instead of going through all of them, I think we should make a decision on this first and then decide on the other comments from there.

• suggest first para have intro and aim of study, 2nd para on height, 3rd on traits and finally to discuss how we tested, looked for interactions, etc. Also, suggest the hook be that all these topics are under debate, and this novel investigation of the tree ring record enables new resolution

Methods

• [x] 13. Nobby made a comment that we should include the fact that it's secondary forest, so I added it in. Not sure if you want it phrased differently.

• [x] 14. Alan suggested adding this part about destr. Unsure if this is the best way or if it's really needed.

remove sentence

• [x] 15. Neil says to call this "cambial growth increment" instead of tree-ring data ? I'd have thought our way was easier to understand

okay as is

• [x] 16. Erika is of the opinion that since this is the first time this data will be published, it should be a main figure, not SI. Thoughts? Also, Norm is questioning if this last equation should be shown here, so a little following Erika's idea.

I'd say no to both.

• [x] 17. Bill is under the impression that DBH is not good for height estimation. However there was no comment from Alan or Neil on this, so I'm going to call this comment resolved in the word doc.

okay.

• [x] 18. Norm, Bill, Erika, and Alan all have problems with this assumption. I checked and Lawren did not comment / did not notice.

Edited to deal with this as best as we can. If reviewers object, our other option is just to drop canopy position from the analysis, but I'd hope to avoid that.

• [x] 19. Bill indirectly questions the feasibility of the data showing the small changes in height over the years.

• [x] 20. Alan: Maybe this could use more explanation. Some of the species (e.g., oaks) have a lot of variation between highly dissected sun leaves and larger shade leaves. Does “sun-exposed branches” mean that only sun leaves were sampled? Was there effort to control for the type of shoot (determinate vs. indeterminate) or the position of the leaves within the shoot?

checking with Nobby. copied you on email.

• [x] 21. Nobby: Is this the WD we sampled or Ryan? How was volume estimated? Archimedes’ displacement

It's Nobby's measurements. Add that volume was estimated using Archimedes’ displacement.

• [x] 22. Nobby: Do we need a R script to calculate TLP??? Does the script include the leaf hydraulic conductance

It's a simple calculation. can remove "and R scripts".

• Alan: I usually see water potentials indicated by Ψ (Ian: I thought we figured this out?)

It seems it can be either. Never heard back from Lawren as to preference. Can leave as is.

• [x] 23. Alan: Probably should include specific sensor heights here (Ian: Are we allowed to reference elsewhere in the text since we talk about these sensor heights later?)

I don't think it's necessary to list the heights here, but it would be good to say something like "a vertical profile spanning from Xm height to above the top of the canopy"

• [x] 24. Bill: Can lower growth rate be due to anything else besides drought? Insect outbreak? (Ian I'm wondering if we need to have a separate, clarifying statement here addressing this?)

Add a sentence following the first sentence of this paragraph: "Simultaneous consideration of both meteorological conditions and tree growth ensured that drought was the primary driver of observed growth declines and that our focus remained on droughts that substantially impacted the forest community."

• [x] 25. Bill: Why not past august? And why not before May – would not wet springs build up water reserves in trees (Ian: I don't remember our reasoning for this other than the general main period of the growing season is May-August. I will note that Bill is the only one who commented on this).

I think this is sufficiently addressed by this sentence earlier in the paragraph: "Separately, we identified the years with driest conditions during May-August, which stood out in the analysis of (Helcoski et al., 2019) as the current-year months to which annual growth was most sensitive for trees at this site."

• [x] 26. Valentine suggested to specify range of R and what R<1 or R >1 would mean to help the reader understand the results afterwards. However, I don't think this is necessary because we never actually give the raw numbers of R - we only use it in regression models.

• [x] 27. From Valentine: This needs to be reworded. I cannot understand what is going on. Maybe you just need to use another word than multivariate… because technically your first analysis is multivariate since you have height as you “base model”. Also, explain why you are doing the second part of the analysis. Or not just that one? I think I don’t get why you are separating “univariate” and “multivariate” analysis. In other words, why would you look at the results of a univariate model if you know there are other variables that make that model better? You know that the sign of a coefficient can switch when you add another variable. It is not worth looking at that coefficient until you’ve found the best model. If you change that, you can get rid of Table4. (Ian. I kind of get what Valentine is saying. I reworded both of these paragraphs to be a little more clear, but I'm not sure if you wanted to do a more substantial change here based on her comments). Now issue #74

Results

• [x] 32. Valentine: in your introduction you say that there is little knowledge on smaller recurring droughts. Maybe this is a good place to put the extent of these droughts in perspective compared to the more studied ones ?

That would be a really hard thing to do quantitiatively. We'd have to review strengths of studied droughts.

• [x] 33. Alan is wondering we should be using Rt to refer to resistance, since using just R may make people confused with R-squared or other statistics.
• Bill is also questioning our use of 2 decimal places.

both good points. both fixed.

• [x] 34. Valentine asked if we considered running the same analysis but with dominant and co-dominant combined since it seems the height difference wasn't too different. We didn't do that (I think?), and it would be easy enough to do, but it would entail a full, new set of results.

Actually, differences in crown position that aren't completely correlated with height are exactly what we're after!

• [x] 35. This is my comment. Do you also want to refer to Figure 2-e/f here? This is the only figure that illustrates tree height from the full plot with traits.

• also I'm not sure it's good to put TableS4 as representing the first part of the sentence. None of the tables incorporate full-plot data combined with species traits, and TableS4 is the best models for each drought year but this is only for the analysis done on the cored trees. I'm not sure how the full-plot height data compared with species traits (in Figure 2e/f) influences this.

• [x] 36. Bill has a comment here that I'm not sure I understand: he asked if the differences in R are species measures since we specify this is a community-level response. I believe this can be disregarded.

• [x] 37. Valentine: I missed how you test that…. I think get it and it is probably fine but I think you would have to look at the standard errors associated with the coefficients (or do some more complicated stats) to be able to really say that you tested the hypothesis.

Discussion

• [x] 38. Valentine: In the end, how did you define microhabitat? The word appears only in the introduction and here (you use microenvironment elsewhere). You need to define more what variables are part of this in the methods. And also be careful not to overstate that you described all the microhabitats the trees were in… You only measured some aspect of microhabitats.

• Ian comment: microhabitat was used only 3 times, so I've changed those to be microenvironment and in the summary, specified that it's microenvironment characteristics. I'm not sure if this is a description that needs to be updated throughout the document.

• [x] 39. Valentine notes the comment about smaller trees comes out of the blue since the intro talks only about larger trees (I think this is fine tho, as we bring it up only bc of the results). Erika asks if "greater sensitivity" means larger growth reductions, and Nobby asks if "crowded individuals" means individuals that are clumped together.

• in addition, Norm makes the point that we shouldn't use "suffer" as a verb because the act of reducing growth in response to drought doesn't mean that the tree is inherently doing poorly.

• [x] 40. Alan: Does this assume that trees in wetter microsites have a limited volume available for their roots due to a high water table? Does a lower water table in drier topographic positions necessarily mean that a tree’s roots will fill all of the volume available?

• [x] 41. Neil: The lead up to each drought would seem to matter…dry prior to 1966, wetter leading up to the latter droughts.

• [x] 42. Erika: I think some of our mortality data can provide some meat here

• [x] 43. Neil: There might have been some selection, too, following the 1960s drought….maybe….don’t have a report from that region, but just north of there tree mortality with the 1960s drought; Maybe more adaptation leading up to the 1960s drought due to prolonged drought?

  • Druckenbrod et al 2019. Redefining temperate forest responses to climate and disturbance in the eastern United States: New insights at the mesoscale.

• [x] 44. Neil: Changes in tree density around some trees due to mortality or big crown dieback? (Ian: this is something I could easily put in myself and change the sentence, but I'm not sure if it's actually the truth.

• Also from Neil: From BAI? Jane Foster has a nice paper showing tree size is important in overall growth. The removing that trend, via standardization, might show a more consistent result. Doesn’t change what you say here, but gives more nuance. I understand using BAI, but it might somewhat mask impact of growth annually and interannually.

• [x] 45. Unsure what you meant here (from Valentine and Alan)

• [x] 46. This comment from Alan/Neil/Norm also refers to other citations for this sentence (depending on how we address it)

• I’m not sure if this is necessarily true for suppressed tuliptree, if there were any in the dataset. Maybe it would be worth taking a quick look at a plot of individual raw tree-ring series to see if there were trees that had fast growth when young but then slowed down and continued to maintain slow growth to present. If you want to revise the sentence to suggest that reductions/removal of competition can enhance resistance to drought, there are many references.

• Norm: Not necessarily; canopy gaps created by death/falling of Dom/Co-Dom trees could release their suppression

• [x] 47. Unsure what citation Erika is talking about: also add McGArvey and Jonathan

• [x] 48. Bill is saying this about the 2 paragraphs following this comment: "These 2 paragraphs do not add much to the discussion and cold be dropped to allow the main points to stand out. "

• Valentine also adds this in at the start of the second of these paragraphs: "Discussion is getting long… I did not review this carefully. Have the feeling it is not as relevant as or is getting into to much details"

• [x] 49. Erika: earlier we said that we don’t have data on mortality explained by drought but here height becomes a predictor of mort?

• [x] 50. Nobby: I would not describe oaks as a typical pioneer species – especially at locations where it co-occurs with hickories. They have high wood densities, relatively slow growth and large seeds. This are all characteristics of late successional species. What would be the dominating climax species? Currently Liriodendron (means it’s a secondary forest)? (but oak is shade-intolerant, establishes after disturbances)

Acknowledgments

• [x] 51. Norm: See Bourg et al. (2013) for recommended acknowledgement language to add here for the initial census

[mcgregorian1]

For Nobby's, it doesn't seem like I can "resolve" the changes in word, so I'm going to comment "fixed" on which of his suggestions I've implemented.

[mcgregorian1]

Hi @teixeirak, given the now 6 additional edit versions we received in the last week, I'm wondering if it would be worth it to consolidate all these comments in a google doc? As in, I can copy the manuscript into a google doc and transfer over the comments. I think this would be easier to see things at the large picture scale, because if we keep things separate as they are, then we may have fixed or edited something that a later editor has a better suggestion for but then we would have already spent the time changing it from before.

What do you think? I'm judging high school science fairs this morning, but I'm planning to do more with this this afternoon and tomorrow morning.

[teixeirak]

You’re welcome to do whatever you think is easiest. I’m not sure how a google doc would work. You could use the Word function to merge docs, but that doesn’t work well when there are multiple changes to a section. Personally, I think I’d find it easiest to just open them al at once and flip through one page at a time, highlighting what you ‘ve fixed in the original doc. But up to you.

[mcgregorian1]

Ah ok I never knew that was possible.

I think I was able to combine all the comments (even overlapping ones), so what I'll do is go through from top to bottom, and if there are any edits I'm not sure about making, I'll make a comment in the .Rmd file saying "see ___ comment" or something.

• I didn't include Joseph's because you had mentioned you were pretty much done with his edits (and his edits aren't in the same format as everyone else's)

I'll note the section/page number I get to in the commit or comment here

[mcgregorian1]

I made a comment in the document, but for these areas where Alan or someone else suggests multiple sources, is it ok for me to just add them or do you recommend going through each one to double-check their relevance? I'm not sure what authors normally do in this case

[teixeirak]

You can just add them. I trust our coathors!

[mcgregorian1]

As Lawren's feedback (at least in the intro) seems to be focused on the overall scope of discussion, I'm not going to add him to the combined feedback document so I can more easily get through it - then we can see about incorporating his

[mcgregorian1]

I've updated to end of methods, without Lawren's. I thought it would be easier if I made the full list of larger comments (as in, comments I couldn't fully solve on my own) above at the top of this issue. My goal was to get through everyone else's comments first before going back and adding Lawren's.

I'm not sure how much more time I'll have before I come up on Friday bc of deadlines I have here but hopefully I can get more done.

[mcgregorian1]

For the record, Lawren's comments revolve around re-framing the intro, which would involve larger changes. He makes a lot of small edits to make this idea a reality, so instead of going through all of those I just made a comment at the beginning of the intro, whereby we'll decide what to do about the rest of his comments based on our answer to that.

[mcgregorian1]

@teixeirak Ryan doesn't have many comments / fixes so I'm going to consider his done. The main response he said was about ITRB:

"I never heard back from them though I emailed them twice and followed their protocols. Send me an email and I’ll try and contact them again and CC Ian, Krista, and anyone else. I don’t know why they never got back to me"

[mcgregorian1]

I have just started the discussion and it seems some of the heavier comments that will take more consideration (i.e. from Alan and Neil) are here.

[teixeirak]

* 28. Lawren suggests including growth rings because it's novel, such that the title would be "The influence of hydraulic traits on temperate tree drought responses resolved in their growth rings."

I'm for keeping the title as it is. Lawren's proposed title neglects the role of tree size, and I'm not sure how to include all that without making it clunky. Also, what's novel here is the combination of approaches; I love that we use tree rings but don't feel the need to feature it in the title.

Also, regarding the title, I'd prefer to see either temperate deciduous forest or temperate broadleaf forest. Both will convey a similar message (because most temperate broadleaf forests are deciduous, and vice-versa), and its not necessary to be too precise in the title (makes it too wordy).

[teixeirak]

* . Alan: A couple things to consider:
  (1)  Did you look at growth rate (raw growth rate or BAI, not standardized RWI) prior to the drought? The pre-drought growth rate might be a better predictor of drought response than height or leaf-level physiological traits. I would expect pre-drought growth rate to integrate some of the other characteristics.

interesting suggestion, but I don't want to get into that

  (2)  Is there an easy way to look at local neighborhood competition since the trees are mapped? I would expect local competition and pre-drought growth rate to be important drivers of drought response, but maybe not for trees that are already taller than most/all of the competing trees.

again, interesting suggestion, but I don't want to get into that. neighorhoods change

[teixeirak]

@teixeirak Ryan doesn't have many comments / fixes so I'm going to consider his done. The main response he said was about ITRB:

"I never heard back from them though I emailed them twice and followed their protocols. Send me an email and I’ll try and contact them again and CC Ian, Krista, and anyone else. I don’t know why they never got back to me"

Done. Please remove ITRDB reference from paper for now.

[teixeirak]

* 2. Erika suggests spelling out the best predictor traits despite the next bullet point.

No space to spell this out within word limit. Skip.

[teixeirak]

* 3. Erika is of the opinion that broadleaf should not be included here, instead using "deciduous". She also added deciduous to the title. I'm unsure if this is redundant**

I don't think it hurts to have both in keywords, but let's go with just one in the title. You're first author; go with what you prefer.

[teixeirak]

* 29. Lawren suggested the last sentence here be deleted and replaced with "Yet, the influence of tree size and species’ traits on tree growth during drought has remained unclear. The dendrochronological record provides a window through which to test key hypotheses." I'm including this as a comment because I don't have a good reason for either incorporating or disregarding this.

Good suggestion, but no space to make abstract (much) longer. Consider this: "The dendrochronological record provides a window through which we can understand how tree size and species’ traits interactively shape tree growth responses during droughts." I also think what we have is good. Keep in mind that the abstract was right at the word limit, so any addition to length has to be compensated by shortening elsewhere.

[mcgregorian1]

I have finished going through the paper / adding just a couple more comments from when we spoke earlier.

Am I correct in assuming that if you've checked the box next to the comment number above then that means you've addressed/updated the manuscript accordingly? I don't want to double-work on things.

[teixeirak]

Correct.

[teixeirak]

I believe that all coauthor comments are now either taken care of or recorded in separate issues.

CLOSING THIS!!!