英文回复信范例 Response Letter.docVIP

Dear Editors and Reviewers, Thank you for your letter and comments on our manuscript titled “Temporal variability in soil moisture after thinning in semi-arid Picea crassifolia plantations in northwestern China” (FORECO_2017_459). These comments helped us improve our manuscript, and provided important guidance for future research. We have addressed the editor’s and the reviewers’ comments to the best of our abilities, and revised text to meet the Forest Ecology and Management style requirements. We hope this meets your requirements for a publication. We marked the revised portions in red and highlighted them yellow in the manuscript. The main comments and our specific responses are detailed below: Editor: Please explain how the results in this paper are significantly different from those in Zhu, X., He, Z.B., Du, J., Yang, J.J., Chen, L.F., 2015. Effects of thinning on the soil moisture of the Picea crassifolia plantation in Qilian Mountains. Forest Research. 28, 55–60.) Response: We apologize for our earlier lack of clarity about the differences between our study and those in “Zhu, X., He, Z.B., Du, J., Yang, J.J., Chen, L.F., 2015. Effects of thinning on the soil moisture of the Picea crassifolia plantation in Qilian Mountains. Forest Research. 28, 55–60” (named “previous article” below). Specifically, we found three main differences in the temporal variability and hydrological responses of soil moisture between our study and the “previous article”. First, the scope of data analysis and use were different: The “previous article” just applied the one growing season data (from June 28th to October 25th 2013) from the natural forest and the plantations with no thinning and thinned in 20% intensity. In addition, the “previous article” also has not considered the effect of 40% thinning on the soil moisture of the Picea crassifolia plantation. However, in the present study, we applied four years data (from June 27th 2012 to October 30th 2015 in HD and NF; from Januar