Hydro-ecological controls on dissolved carbon dynamics in groundwater and export to streams in a temperate pine forest

Deirmendjian, Loris; Loustau, Denis; Augusto, Laurent; Lafont, Sébastien; Chipeaux, Christophe; Poirier, Dominique; Abril, Gwenaël

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-669-2018

Articles | Volume 15, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-669-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-15-669-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 15, issue 2

Research article

|

01 Feb 2018

Research article |

| 01 Feb 2018

Hydro-ecological controls on dissolved carbon dynamics in groundwater and export to streams in a temperate pine forest

Loris Deirmendjian, Denis Loustau, Laurent Augusto, Sébastien Lafont, Christophe Chipeaux, Dominique Poirier, and Gwenaël Abril

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Final revised paper (published on 01 Feb 2018)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 12 Apr 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

- Printer-friendly version

- Supplement

RC1: 'Reviews for Deirmendjian et al., bg-2017-90', Anonymous Referee #1, 07 May 2017
- AC1: 'Reply for Referee 1', loris deirmendjian, 12 Jul 2017
RC2: 'Comments to bg-2017-90', Anonymous Referee #2, 25 May 2017
- AC2: 'Reply for Referee 2', loris deirmendjian, 12 Jul 2017
AC3: 'Supplementary_Companion_Paper', loris deirmendjian, 12 Jul 2017
AC4: 'Supplementary_Answer_for_Editor', loris deirmendjian, 12 Jul 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (28 Jul 2017) by Nobuhito Ohte

AR by loris deirmendjian on behalf of the Authors (14 Sep 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (27 Sep 2017) by Nobuhito Ohte

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (13 Oct 2017)

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (21 Oct 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Major Comments
I appreciate authors’ efforts in addressing the previous issues.
I am sorry but I still have some concerns that need to be addressed.
First, I still think the Result section is way too long. Authors need to carefully edit the section to make it easy for readers to follow, while keeping information to length ratio in mind. Second, authors have divided the study period into several seasons/flow conditions but do they really have enough sample size to understand the catchment processes for each season or flow condition? In my opinion, this is a limitation of the study and should be clearly mentioned in the paper. Third, there are still lots of typos that need to be fixed.

Specific Comments:

Introduction-
Line 49 Authors could add some more references as this was established long ago.
Line 76- Would “provide” be a better choice? Enable doesn’t seem appropriate here?
Line 85- Odd word usage- “migration of water table”?
Line 84-90- The language of the objectives could be tightened as they are long and very descriptive. I would recommend turning these loose objectives into more concrete and impactful questions.
Line 113- Can we use “ recharge” instead of fuels?
Line 246- drainage “enrichment”? What does it mean?
Line 249- “Low/lower” order not “inferior” order.

Line 250 It would be nice to add few text on how authors got "2.3 fold". Citing an unpublished paper doesn’t help here and several other places in the draft.

Results-
It is confusing and distracting to have results and methods together in the same section. Both together have made results way longer than what it should have been without methods.

Line 275- 305 Too much text has been dedicated to a single figure. Most of the information shared in the text can be easily read and understood from the figure 2.
It is unclear that why author choose to show precipitation on a negative scale? Is it because of the input versus output?

Discussion-
Line 438- I am not sure this statement is entirely true. The study was conducted for 18 months but there are several gaps in the collected datasets. As per Table S1, there are only 6 occasions when the datasets were available for all groundwater wells and stream. Is it OK to divide such short period (18 months) in multiple flow conditions and seasons when some of the flow conditions have 1-2 GW observations?

Line 454- Please edit this sentence - “transpiration flow through plants and the evapotranspiration were maximum….”?

Line 496- Please edit this sentence! It may make sense to start the sentence with “ During base flow conditions…”

Line 490-Line 533 It would be nice to break this 1.5 page long paragraph into more readable 2-3 paragraphs.

Figures-
Fig1 – Please add units to topography in the map legend.
Fig7 – Please Fix typo in GS column- decreasing.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (03 Nov 2017) by Nobuhito Ohte

AR by loris deirmendjian on behalf of the Authors (10 Dec 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (28 Dec 2017) by Nobuhito Ohte

AR by loris deirmendjian on behalf of the Authors (29 Dec 2017)

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Short summary

Carbon leaching to streams represents a very small (~ 2 %) fraction of forest net ecosystem exchange (NEE). Such weak export of carbon from forest ecosystems, at least in temperate regions, is at odds with recent studies that attempt to integrate the contribution of inland waters in the continent carbon budget. Understanding why local and global carbon mass balances strongly diverge on the proportion of land NEE exported to aquatic systems is a major challenge for research in this field.