Editor and Reviewer comments:

Editor: This needs more work. First, you need to get the English edited. In the Abstract, for example: What does 'disparate' mean? 'preformed' should be performed; 'working area curve' should be 'area under the curve'; 'concentration greenhouse gas emissions' makes no sense - emissions and concentrations are different things in different units; etc. Also the SSPs are NOT 'obsessive-compulsive' scenarios: that is a term only used in human psychology. Second, you need to explain and justify your choice of environmental variables. The high AUC is meaningless if you have excluded important variables. Your model assumes that this species grows on any soil, in any vegetation, including cultivated areas. Is this true? Third, you need to read the recent discussions on the problems with MaxEnt. It can work well, but only if you know what you are doing. Fourth, you must explain how this species moves. How are the seeds dispersed? How far can it move in one tree generation? How far by 2070? Finally, you must make practical conservation recommendations, allowing for dispersal limitation if the species will not be able to occupy all the areas with newly available climatic conditions.

Reviewer #1: In this paper, Maxent model and ArcGIS software are used to predict the potential geographic distribution of Taiwania cryptomerioides in China under climate change, which will provide a scientific and theoretical basis for the reasonable protection and management for Taiwania cryptomerioides. The paper addresses specific scientific issues, with true and reliable data, clear ideas of writing, and credible conclusions through scientific methods except some minor problems as follows:

1.The subject addressed in this article is worthy of investigation.The information presented is new.The conclusions are supported by the data. But recent studies should be added to the Introduction. It is suggested to add more comparisons with the results of the latest researches related to the fields of this paper.

2.What is the basis for "Our results showed that When the existence probability of Taiwania cryptomerioides is greater than 0.5, the corresponding environmental factor value is the critical value of Taiwania cryptomerioides" in line 33-37 of page ten and "Jackknife validation creates the model by using and excluding one environment variable in turn and using all environment variables" in line 58-59 of page six of the article？Names of the variables need to be unified in Figure 4.

3."The ArcGIS 10.2 were used to perform the analysis of Pearson correlation in 22
environmental variables" in line 54-55 of page five of the article. What does "22
environmental variables" represent? Can you explain it concretely?

4.Section 2.5. Discuss the necessity of Analysis of multivariate environmental similarity surface and explain why it is done. The specific value in Figure 3 is not clear, please add it in a new table.

In summary, owing to the standardized style of writing, reasonable diagrams and clear discussions and ideas, it is recommended that your journal can accept this paper for publication after author's careful supplementations and relevant contents improvement.



Reviewer #2: Review of "Study on Taiwania cryptomerioides under Climate Change: MaxEnt Modeling for Predicting the Potential Geographical Distribution" by Zhao and Xhang.

This study investigated the future distribution of Taiwania cryptomerioides using species distribution modeling. I find the results are straightforward and discussion is acceptable. I think the results obtained can help in the conservation of Taiwania in the future. It is rather strange that I can't find author information in the manuscript. I have no objection to the publication of the manuscript in the journal of Global Ecology and Conservation.
Nonetheless, I found several places in the context either need to be clarified or appended in the revision and summarized in the following.

Line 57 page 5, ten environmental variables with the correlation coefficient greater than 0.8 were used in the distribution modeling. I think the author need to explain this in more detail and I can't find the citing of Yang, et al (2013) in the reference.

Figure 3, I think it is better to have labeling for the X axis in the figure 3.

The parameters used in the distribution modelling such as MaxEnt model and MESS need to be described in more detail, and I think statistical software and techniques should be mentioned wherever necessary (such as calculation of correlation coefficients).

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