Pastoral Burning and Its Contribution to the Fire Regime of Alto Minho, Portugal

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper validates quantitatively what much of the literature on pastoral burning has been arguing through numerous case studies and review papers globally for the past 43 years regarding the inverse correlation between pastoral fires (Winter and Spring burning) and wildfires (Summer). The paper does a great job of quantifying this interaction in northern Portugal, findings that can be easily extrapolated to all of the northern Iberian Peninsula (Pyrenees, Basque Country, Cantabria, Asturias, Galicia, Northern Portugal) and much of northern Southern Europe (France, Italy, etc.). The paper makes an important contribution to this literature and for this reason I recommend its publication as is, no minor or major revisions needed. One cannot help wonder how many more of these papers need to be published before fire management in these regions shifts to an active incentivization and decriminalization of these types of fires by authorities at all levels of European governance (EU and its directives on biomass burning, national and regional laws on biomass burning). Though obviously this is not the aim of the authors of this paper.

The most intriguing finding from a scholarly point of view, which I suggest the authors explore further in future work, is the longer return interval observed of pastoral fires with regards to wildfires (lines 334-336). This finding could have important implications for future studies of estimates of greenhouse gas emissions resulting from pastoral fires vs wildfires.   

Author Response

Reply to Reviewer 1

We thank the reviewer for the enthusiastic feedback.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is very well prepared and written. Only minor revision is required:

- Please check once again editing - for instance, line 11 "regions ssmost".

- Tab.2 and Fig. 3, Tab. 3 Fig.4 - revise/separate burn probability and frequency, figures should have a clear explanation of what frequency means.

- The article is a bit "local", the authors should compare the results to the surrounding area and maybe to EU (the same fires in France, Greece etc.), for instance, all the figures indicate red area in the northeast corner. It could be interesting what is going on just behind this line, even in general.

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Author Response

Reply to reviewer 2 comments

The article is very well prepared and written. Only minor revision is required.

Thank you

Please check once again editing - for instance, line 11 "regions ssmost".

We checked the entire text of the manuscript and did a number of corrections and grammar improvements.

Tab.2 and Fig. 3, Tab. 3 Fig.4 - revise/separate burn probability and frequency, figures should have a clear explanation of what frequency means.

Burn probability and fire frequency are the same, but to avoid confusion we now only mention fire frequency in the tables and figures and their captions.

The article is a bit "local", the authors should compare the results to the surrounding area and maybe to EU (the same fires in France, Greece etc.), for instance, all the figures indicate red area in the northeast corner. It could be interesting what is going on just behind this line, even in general.

We could not find additional studies on fire-livestock relationships that could be directly compared, as their subject were different or the context was completely different.

The "red area" is thoroughly addressed and discussed in the text and is part of the Castro Laboreiro parish that we treated separately.