Response on the “Characterising wildfire impacts on ecosystem services: A triangulation of scientific findings, governmental reports, and expert perceptions in Portugal”

When reading the research paper “Characterising wildfire impacts on ecosystem services: A triangulation of scientific findings, governmental reports, and expert perceptions in Portugal” we came across some misleading formulations we felt the need to refute. Particularly, in what concerns the selection of scientific publications, the 3-year delay between data collection and article publication, and the corresponding data interpretations.

 

The first issue is the choice of keywords used for the systematic search. Although the authors of the study allowed some flexibility for terms such as “fire” and “wildfire”, other terms related to “impact assessment” were not considered, which limited the number of potentially eligible studies. In an attempt to reproduce the search used by the authors, the string “TITLE-ABS-KEY (*fire AND Portugal AND impact* assess*) was used in Scopus (21/03/2023) returning 352 publications. However, the simple addition of the keyword ”monitor” or “monitoring”, which is highly connected to impact assessment (*fire AND Portugal AND monitor* OR impact* assess*), results in 14,953 publications. As an example, the authors’ search resulted in 8 publications from Vieira DCS, and in the suggested search, this number increased to 21. Moreover, we acknowledge that “ecosystem services” might be a relatively new term to be included in the search, although included in the title, but no keywords related to the target ecosystem components were used, namely soil, air, water, and/or vegetation. Thus, the search performed by the authors might not entirely suit the research targets.