文档介绍：Dear Editors and Reviewers,
Thank you for your letter and commentson 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 stylerequirements. We hope this meets your requirements for a publication.
Wemarked 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, ., Du, J., Yang, ., Chen, ., 2015.
-60.)
Effects of thinning on the soil moisture of the Picea crassifolia plantation in Qilian Mountains. Forest Research. 28, 55
Response:We apologize for our earlier lack of clarity about the differences between our study and those in Zhu, X., He, ., Du, J.,
Yang, ., Chen, ., 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 inthe temporal variability and hydrological responses of soil moisture between our study and the previous article ”.
First, the scope of data analysis and useweredifferent:The previous article "just appliedthe one growing season data (from June 28th to
October25 th 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 27 th2012 to October 30 th 2015 in HD and NF; from Jan