Dear,

Thank you for uploading your contribution to the discussion. As both the comments of the referees and your replies are thoughtful, I would like to invite you to prepare a revised manuscript that incorporates all the issues raised during the discussion. This will considerably increase the length of the manuscript. Note that if the revised manuscript is in line with the on-line discussion, it will be send out for review again.

Kind regards,

Dear author,

Thank you for submitting a revised version of the manuscript “Stand age and species composition effects on surface albedo in a mixedwood boreal forest”. I would like to apologize for the substantial delay in making a decision but your replies reached me the first day of a rather long holiday.

Despite the negative recommendation of the second referee (who is a well-established specialist in the field), the thoughtful discussion was found sufficiently convincing to invite you to “prepare a revised manuscript that incorporates ALL the issues raised during the discussion”. Although the revisions largely satisfy this requirement for the comments made by referee #1, it partly fails to do so for the comments by referee #2 and the comments made by one of the journal’s editors. Especially the comments dealing with conceptual shortcomings of the study are at present not properly addressed in the manuscript.

The cover letter frequently refers to the interactive discussion as a justification of why a comment has not been dealt with in the manuscript itself. In this context it should be noted that although the interactive discussion is an integral part of the review process, the manuscript should, nevertheless, be a stand-alone item that can be read and correctly interpreted without expecting the reader to read the interactive discussion as well.

Once all issued raised during the interactive discussion are addressed in the manuscript, the revised manuscript will be send out to the same reviewers again. Please find below some more detailed guidance of how this requirement can be reached.

Looking forward to a revised manuscript,



Referee 1
Comment 9. The reply does not address the point made by the referee: is there robust evidence that charcoal affects the background albedo during a harvest decades after a fire? The referee seems to question this hypothesis because within days to weeks after a harvest the residual charcoal may be covered by snow, litter, herbs, mosses and/or ferns.

Comment 19. This confused the referee and is likely to confuse other readers as well. Rewrite this sentence (it requires adding a single word which would have been less work than the reply and my subsequent comment).

Comment 20. Add this information to the caption of the relevant figures. Readers should easily understand why different figures have different numbers of observations.

Comment 26. Replace “… aspen may account for this effect” by “aspen may cause for this effect”.

Comment 27. Neither the reply nor the manuscript addresses why the albedo values seem 50% higher as noted by the referee.

Comment 30. Add this information to the caption of the relevant figures. Readers should easily understand why different figures have different numbers of observations.

Comment 31, 32, 35, 36. This confused the referee and is likely to confuse other readers as well. Address this issue in the manuscript.

Comment 33. “Dramatic” is a subjective interpretation. Remove from the manuscript or define when and why a chance in albedo should be considered dramatic.

Referee 2
Comment 1. Based on the presented material the referee concluded that the manuscript lacks novel ideas or data. The authors could add a paragraph in which they show how their work goes beyond the work presented in the papers listed by the referee. Such a paragraph should avoid that other readers come to the same conclusion as the referee.


Editor
Comment 1. The discussion is still very much centered on stand age and does not even touch on the issue that age is not a driving process. The age-oriented approach is a shortcoming of the study and limits the value of the results and its applicability for data-model comparison. It is not because there is long tradition of studying age-related patterns in forestry that this tradition is well justified and should not be questioned.

Dear dr Halim,

Thanks you uploading a revised version of your manuscript “Stand age and species composition effects on surface albedo in a mixed wood boreal forest”. The revised manuscript has now been seen by one reviewer and an associate editor. Although the reviewer appreciated your efforts in better explaining some technical and methodological aspects of the study, the revisions did not address their concern that the results are to a large extent determined by the secondary data. The proposal to also present new GLM fits based only on the original data collected in this study appears as a good compromise between respecting the objectives of your study and the desire of the editorial team to avoid publishing flawed results. Depending on the outcome of these analyses, the results should be presented in the main text or the supplement.

In my opinion the reviewer is right in pointing to the conflict between the age-dependent albedo data you provide and the structure-dependent approach the modelling community and forest managers are using. Either you demonstrate that the modelling community is ill-informed and that stand age rather than stand structure is driving temporal dynamics in albedo or you provide analyses showing the relationships between basal area, height, volume, above-ground biomass on the one hand and albedo on the other hand. These changes in the analyses should be reflected in the discussion.

Looking forward to receiving a revised manuscript,

Dear,

I would like to apologize for the delay in handling your revised manuscript due to summer holiday followed by the start of the academic year. I have now carefully evaluated the new figures and read the discussion. In my opinion the manuscript can now be accepted for publication in Biogeosciences.

Note that Photo S1 doesn’t add anything to the study. As the credibility of research is already challenged by the so-called “post-truth” developments, I feel we should maintain the highest standards and refrain from everything that could be used to question our credibility. Although the picture is just slightly humorous, its focus (and the focus of the caption) is on the author rather than on the equipment. Replace the picture by a picture that shows the equipment (with or without its surroundings) or remove the picture.

Kind regards,
Sebastiaan Luyssaert