Legal Risk in the Management of Forest Cover in a River Basin San Juan, Cuba

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

The manuscript reflects on the relationship between reality and legal conceptual utopia. This is analyzed from an interesting and subtle approach. However, it needs to be refined.

Here are some recommendations:

38, 53, 86, 68, 115, 158, 178, etc. Some references are placed in places where they lose meaning. Revise the entire manuscript.

128, 136, 164, 192, 207, and more. Avoid writing in the first person. Review the entire manuscript.

207. "We identify the San Juan River Basin as a local interest protected ecosystem". How did you identify a local interest? Support more or cite the references.

Figure 2. improve the map. The legend does not match the content, for example, the orange polygon is not described. The settlements cannot be identified. It is not necessary to use many numbers in the scale of the graph.

Table 2. specify the level of territorial management, local or national.

215 - 223. support by reference.

273. This paragraph should be included in the methodology section

Try to structure the results section according to the same structure as the methodology section.

Include a note in Table 3 about some values that result from the classification

Better explain the sources of information used to create Table 4. How did you calculate year by year?

428, 443-454, 490-492. In the Discussion section, there are entire paragraphs describing the results. These should be inserted in the correct section. Similarly, lines 470-476 describe conclusions; these also need to be in the correct sections.

506-509.It is not recommended to include references in the conclusions section, these should be referenced in the previous sections.

Because of the approach taken to the manuscript, a combination of spatial analysis and legal assessment, the conclusions section should be much more robust and should follow the methodology section and the results section (which should also be restructured. like the methodology section). This section reflects on the efforts undertaken per se.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer 1
Many thanks for your essential contributions to the improvement of this article. We're sending in the attachment our responses. 
Best regard

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I found this paper to be very interesting, meticulous, with high quality standard. This cab be a result of a good authors team work. The theoretical and methodological approach is rigorous enough to warrant very interesting scientific results. it could be enough to use socio-economic approaches but the use of remote sensing to ascertain legal risks in management of forest cover which has implication to river basin water flows is quite interesting and it add value and methodological contribution to assessment of different socio-economic factors that has an implication to the resource base or the other way round. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer 2
Thank you very much for your opinion regarding our article. 

All the best 

Reviewer 3 Report

General comments:

The manuscript, entitled "Legal risk in the management of forest cover in a river basin San Juan, Cuba" analyzes the legal risk in managing hydrographic river basins of interest in Santiago de Cuba. There are some issues with this manuscript, mainly related to the readability and composition of the manuscript.

 Please review the quality of your English throughout the manuscript.

Specific comments:

Point 1: Line 31: Add some recommendations at the end of the abstract to policymakers and implementers.

Point 2: Line 86: [xx-xx] what does it mean?

Point 3: Line 233: Table 2 moves into the appendix section.

Point 4: Line 419: Improve Figure 5.

Point 5: Line 224: The result section is weak so; I suggest that needs reworking.

Point 6: Line 421; Discussion section: This is an important part of the study and writes at least two to three pages. Your writing of the discussion section looks more like a conclusion section and is very weak. Moreover, discuss and compare your results thoroughly and argue your results with other similar research in order to emphasize the originality and novelty of the research.

Point 7: Line 493: Conclusions are very short so it needs reworking.

Point 8: Write some recommendations separately to policymakers and implementers as a new subsection after the conclusion.

Questions:

ü  What are the contributions of your research?

ü  How does it improve our overall understanding of the subject material?

ü  What future directions in research are suggested from your findings and conclusions?

ü   How does your research complement and support the key hypotheses from the published literature on this subject?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 3
Many thanks for your essential contributions to the improvement of this article. We're sending in the attachment our responses. 
Best regard

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper entitled “Legal risk in the management of forest cover in a river basin San Juan, Cuba” presents an interesting research. However, I have some comments about potential improvements of the paper. Below I present some points which could be taken into account while improving the manuscript.

1. “Deforestation [3] impacts 38 the loss of biodiversity [2] and the quality of life of the planet's inhabitants.” That is not a full sentence – it is missing a verb.

2. CO2 – please use subscripts.

3. [xx-xx] – did you plan to list references here?

4. Introduction is poorly written. It presents more detailed overview which should not appear in this section. Introduction should explain the research topic, highlight current gap of knowledge and set a clear goal of the research. In current version there are many parts that does not follow this general concept.

5. Titles of subsections should not end with dot sign.

6. In the discussion section it would be interesting to refer to recent technological solutions used to measure situation in water catchments, for example business intelligence.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 4
Many thanks for your essential contributions to the improvement of this article. We're sending in the attachment our responses. 
Best regard

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript, entitled "Legal risk in the management of forest cover in a river basin San Juan, Cuba" analyzes the legal risk in managing hydrographic river basins of interest in Santiago de Cuba. The manuscript improved and I also have some specific comments.

Specific comments.

Line 92: sustainability. [13-20]. Delete the first full stop.

Line 231: natural resources [77]. I suggest that move this citation to the discussion section.

Line 378: Figure 3: Limit the wordings shown in the vertical column.

Author Response

Dear reviewer

Many thanks for all your essential recommendations for the improvement of our article. We are sending our responses.
Best regard

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Minor changes raised in my first review were corrected, however, it is not possible to follow changes made according to my comment of introduction (comment no. 4) and discussion (comment no.6). Range of lines mention in the response is very wide and requires searching for changes individually. Moreover, the manuscript in the revised version in not prepared in the track change mode. As a result I cannot verify if my comments were really taken into account as presented in a response (authors position: agree). For example in comment no. 6 I mentioned reference to business intelligence, authors’ response was agree, but in the whole text I cannot find any reference to business intelligence. Therefore, it does not convince me that authors really made proper modifications as agreed in the response. I suggest that further changes (according to previous comments) are needed.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 4

Many thanks for all your essential recommendations for the improvement of our article. We are sending our responses in attachment.
All the best.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx