Hydrological threats to riparian wetlands of international importance – a global quantitative and qualitative analysis

Schneider, Christof; Flörke, Martina; De Stefano, Lucia; Petersen-Perlman, Jacob D.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-2799-2017

Articles | Volume 21, issue 6

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-2799-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-2799-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 21, issue 6

Research article

|

09 Jun 2017

Research article |

| 09 Jun 2017

Hydrological threats to riparian wetlands of international importance – a global quantitative and qualitative analysis

Christof Schneider, Martina Flörke, Lucia De Stefano, and Jacob D. Petersen-Perlman

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Final revised paper (published on 09 Jun 2017)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 26 Jul 2016)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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RC1: 'Cplleague Review of manuscript titled, "Hydrological threats for riparian wetlands of international importance – a global quantitative and qualitative analysis"', Anonymous Referee #1, 23 Aug 2016
- AC1: 'Response to Referee #1', Christof Schneider, 24 Nov 2016
RC2: 'Review of Schneider et al “Hydrological threats for riparian wetlands of international importance – a global quantitative and qualitative analysis”', Anonymous Referee #2, 19 Oct 2016
- AC2: 'Response to Referee #2', Christof Schneider, 24 Nov 2016
RC3: 'Referee Review - Schneider et al.', Anonymous Referee #3, 27 Oct 2016
- AC3: 'Response to Referee #3', Christof Schneider, 25 Nov 2016

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Publish subject to revisions (further review by Editor and Referees) (22 Dec 2016) by Nandita Basu

AR by Christof Schneider on behalf of the Authors (02 Feb 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (21 Feb 2017) by Nandita Basu

RR by Anonymous Referee #1 (15 Mar 2017)

RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (16 Mar 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I previously reviewed this manuscript and would like to compliment the authors on a much-improved version. The clarity of the revised methods greatly assists in fully understanding their objectives and approaches, thereby increasing the potential impact of the paper. The authors’ synthesis of worldwide patterns of current and future threats to Rasmar wetlands as a result of human-modified flow regimes (e.g., dams) and use of a global hydrological modeling framework to do this should result in a highly-cited paper.

Below, I provide minor suggestions for edits to the manuscript:

General comment: The authors should discuss how the availability of data on different continents and in different countries might have affected their model simulations and findings. One might expect data availability is imbalanced among, for example, wealthier and poorer countries. This hits upon the topic of how uncertainty is addressed in the modeling effort, which is addressed in some capacity in the Discussion. Because the change in hydrology are presented as relatively changes and in “bins” of magnitudes of change, output uncertainty may not be as important as the input uncertainty – such as that of data availability. If there is a clear mention that this particular uncertainty exists, it should be sufficient for the purposes of a global scale analyses.

Page 1, Lines 26-27. Revised the first sentence of the Introduction. It is not grammatically correct. What about, “Natural wetland areas have declined at the global scale by 31% between 1970 and 2008 (Dixon et al. 2016), and even higher numbers are likely for floodplain wetlands specifically”.

Page 3, Lines 10-30. This paragraph seems really long. Suggest making a new paragraph starting on Line 15 to introduce the study’s goals.

Page 3, Line 25: Fully define what you mean by “society’s capacity to act” here. It’s too ambiguous without a definition.

Page 4, Line 33: What is the parameter that’s adjusted in the model. It’s pretty amazing to have only one parameter to adjust.

Page 4, Line 39: Provide (parenthetically) the anthropogenic impacts that are removed from the model for these runs. They can be explained further in subsequent sections, but it’s helpful here to briefly mention them.

Page 4, Line 27: Change “considers now” to “now considers”.

Page 8, Line 29: Define RBO here rather than on Line 33.

Page 11, Line 25: Change “on global scale” to “at global scales”.

Page 12, Line 26: Restate what the two sites are here.

Page 12, Line 35: Start a new paragraph here. This paragraph seems too long.

Page 13, Lines 5-15: This seems to be repetitive and was, in part, discussed on

Page 12. Please revise, potentially by merging the two discussions on capacity to act and counteractive measures.

Page 13, Lines 5-35: There are a lot of grammatical errors and odd sentence structures in this section. Please reread and revise.

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RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (07 Apr 2017)

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (further review by Editor) (14 Apr 2017) by Nandita Basu

AR by Christof Schneider on behalf of the Authors (24 Apr 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (03 May 2017) by Nandita Basu

AR by Christof Schneider on behalf of the Authors (08 May 2017)

Short summary

Riparian wetlands are disappearing worldwide due to altered river flow regimes. The WaterGAP3 modeling framework is used to compare modified to natural flow regimes at 93 Ramsar sites. Results indicate that water resource management seriously impairs inundation patterns at 29 % of the sites. New dam initiatives are likely to affect especially wetlands located in South America, Asia, and the Balkan Peninsula. Hotspots for climate change impacts could be eastern Europe and South America.