Fuel in Tasmanian Dry Eucalypt Forests: Prediction of Fuel Load and Fuel Hazard Rating from Fuel Age

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Article is well written. Article has a good structure, but Conclusion section is missing.

There is small quantity of up-to-date references in the Reference List.

Also article has a one disadvantage. Authors again ignored risk analysis basis that should be applicable to present obtained results. There are two main paths to assess the occurrence of forest fires. The first way is associated with assessing the risk of forest fires (Miller & Ager, 2013). The second path of research is devoted to the assessment of forest fire danger (hazard) (Hardy, 2005). It should be noted that it is necessary to follow the provisions of a rigorous mathematical theory of risk analysis, when a forest fire hazard is expressed in the probability of a forest fire in certain conditions. In fact, all other approaches lack a rigorous mathematical basis and are poorly scientifically grounded. I suggest authors to convert abstract FHR index ranged from 0 to 5 to the mathematically grounded probability of forest fire caused by fuel properties.

 In general, forest fire hazard can be desribed by several probabilities:

Probability of forest fire hazard (occurrence) caused by natural reasons, for example, lightning activity.

Probability of forest fire hazard (occurrence) caused by human activity, for example, recreation.

Probability of forest fire hazard (occurrence) caused by meteorological conditions, such as air temoerature and precipitations.

Probability of forest fire hazard (occurrence) caused by vegetation conditions. In other words, probability of forest fire hazard caused by forest fuel properties. Authors suggest Fuel Hazard Rating terminology and non scientific 5 point index.

I guess that authors did not understand how they can use obtained results. I understood that this is the on-ground study. But you should understand that study must have practical value or further theoretical meaning. There is a big gap between obtained results and its applicability for forest fire theory without linking with forest fire hazard rating.

You can see typical curves in the Figures 6. This is typical curves applicable for long-term forest fire hazard rating caused by fuel properties.

I hold to necesserity of migration from the poor scientificly sounding Fuel Hazard Rating index to the strong mathematical probability theory. Your results is applicable to assess suggested probability of forest fire hazard caused by fuel properties.

I suggest minor revision.

References

Hardy, C. C. (2005). Wildland fire danger and risk: Problems, definitions, and context. Forest Ecology and Management, 211(1-2), 73–82. doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2005.01.029

 Miller, C., & Ager, A. A. (2013). A review of recent advances in risk analysis for wildfire management. International Journal of Wildland Fire, 22(1), 1–14. doi:10.1071/WF11114

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

It is the second time that I read this specific paper. I believe that the authors have incorporated most of the suggested changes and the ms has substantially improved. There are some (minor) suggestions that are included in the attached pdf.  

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Review:

Fuel in Tasmanian dry eucalypt forests: prediction of fuel load and fuel hazard rating from fuel age

 

This paper presents equations for estimating fuel load and fuel hazard ratings in Tasmanian dry Eucalypt forest types for more effective fire management planning. The paper is a useful contribution to fire practitioners in Tasmania and provides a good contrast to existing literature on fuel load accumulations for these forest types. The methods are sound and the conclusions are supported by the results. The main thing to add in revisions is a bit more context in the introduction and consistency among figures and tables.

 

Introduction:

47) delete “this” to read “since then there has been…”

113) There is a brief mention here of the idea that “fuel hazard accumulates in a similar way to load”. I’m not familiar with this phrasing. In the US, hazard typically refers to several different characteristics of the fuel complex including continuous (eg. volume) and categorical (eg. arrangement, type), so “accumulation” doesn’t really make sense for a describing such a complex suite of traits. If there is a different way that hazard is defined in Australia/Tasmania, that’s fine, but this could use a little more background explanation. After reading through the paper, the hazard is a categorical score (low, med, high etc) that’s given a continuous variable (1, 2, 3…) in order to calculate statistics among sites, but I still think it’s odd to describe this as “accumulation” since the numbers are just a stand-in for categories.

114) “hazard scores rather than ratings” – Needs more context on why models for scores vs ratings would be different. Also, how were the the equations from Gould et al. 2011 different from those given here, and why is this important to note? Is it because the published equations are not appropriate for use in Tasmania? Explain.

118-119) Rephrase, eg. “To date, there have been no fuel hazard assessments developed for Tasmania.

 

Methodology:

127) “as part of his PhD’ is not necessary

129) nine years and 15 years later: it would be easier for the readers if you just said what years the measurements occurred

130) “the same to”: the same sites to?

132) It seems implied that sites that were burned, cleared, or developed were excluded from the FHR data but it’s not stated directly.

217) fire age – change to site age?

227) also list any R packages used for analysis

 

Results:

379-385) This paragraph seems more appropriate for the methods section than the results section.

496-509) Same as above, should be in methods section.

617) Reference summary states table where this info is found.

 

Table 1. Categorical ranges could just say low, medium, high etc. to avoid needing to define in the table caption. It’s not defined in the text either when the methods are described so just using the words here would be easier to understand.

 

Table 8. Provide citations in table for derivations of weighting (ok to use personal comm. But can probably reference the papers cited in the text).

 

Table 10. Table 9 has the strata by name, this table has abbreviations but they’re not defined in the text (as far as I could tell). Since there’s space, it would be easier to understand if you used the names here too. You don’t need FHR repeated in every row.

 

Tables 9-11: just find some way to be consistent in how you reference the strata in the table/caption/footnote, they’re all different.

 

Figure 1. This map needs a legend for the colors, not just the study site markers. Or simply use a more traditional black outline for the landmass.

 

Figure 4. Would be clearer to distinguish Fig 3 and 4 if caption for 4 said “Modeled fuel load accumulation curves…”

 

Figure 5. For panels B and C, add the grouping to the Y axis label (eg. “Near surface hazard rating – region” and “near surface hazard rating – litter”)

 

Figure 6. as for Fig. 4, would be more appropriate to call these “modeled” than to say “for new sites”

Reviewer 2 Report

Article is well written. Article has a good structure, but Conclusion section is missing.

There is small quantity of up-to-date references in the Reference List.

 

Also article has a one disadvantage. There are two main paths to assess the occurrence of forest fires. The first way is associated with assessing the risk of forest fires (Miller & Ager, 2013). The second path of research is devoted to the assessment of forest fire danger (hazard) (Hardy, 2005). It should be noted that it is necessary to follow the provisions of a rigorous mathematical theory of risk analysis, when a forest fire hazard is expressed in the probability of a forest fire in certain conditions. In fact, all other approaches lack a rigorous mathematical basis and are poorly scientifically grounded. I suggest authors to convert abstract FHR index ranged from 0 to 5 to the mathematically grounded probability of forest fire caused by fuel properties.

 

Hardy, C. C. (2005). Wildland fire danger and risk: Problems, definitions, and context. Forest Ecology

and Management, 211(1-2), 73–82. doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2005.01.029

 

Miller, C., & Ager, A. A. (2013). A review of recent advances in risk analysis for wildfire management.

International Journal of Wildland Fire, 22(1), 1–14. doi:10.1071/WF11114

 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

In the current article, an attempt is being made to present fuel load and fuel hazard rating accumulation models for dry eucalypt forests in eastern Tasmania. The manuscript presents some complexity, making it difficult for a reader to follow. I suggest simplifying the writing style throughout the ms.

General comments

I suggest changing the reference style, by using numbers instead throughout the manuscript.  

 

Abstract

L18-19 Some keywords are already mentioned in the title.

 

Introduction

This section needs some significant changes. In general terms, it is very difficult for a reader to follow.

L37-44. I suggest the authors transfer the paragraph at the end of the section (last paragraph).

L47. Please improve the expression.

L52-53. It seems that this phrase is irrelevant to the paragraph.

L88-89. Please see the previous comment. I suggest the authors use a single paragraph for describing the aims of their study and some other important information.

L117-118. I suggest the authors avoid any unpublished data/research.

 

Methodology

L134/152 Table 1 and Table 2 are better suited to the appendix. They present the variables only along with the associated measured scales, without any numerical values.

L186 Please improve the figure’s quality.

L211-221 Please add the relevant references for data collection

L261 The sub-section needs to be numbered

L276 Models? Where is the mathematical expression?

L278-280 Please improve the expression

L288 See the previous comment (L276)

L290-291 This is evident for nonlinear OLS models. It can be omitted.

Results

I suggest the authors avoid any references in this section.

Table 10. The estimated parameters in table 10 (L557, L559-562, L565, L568, L571) are statically non-significant according to the (approximate) t-statistic. They must drop from the model and repeat the fitting process.

Discussion

The authors have to incorporate the new results