The authors have been compiling a large carbon data set from a river in Cameroon monitored since ! Beyond the trendy C attribution angle, the authors also have a loosely-defined goal of describing spatial and temporal variations in their river C data set as part of assembling an overall budget for the catchment and they devote much of the results section to describing different trends and patterns.
These deep technical dives are not so well-conceived, lack a conceptual framework and are largely divorced from the broader narrative arc of the paper. There is no doubt important information here, but the reader has little help gleaning it from paragraphs without topic sentences. Overall, this dataset is definitely worthy of publication and makes an important contribution to understanding riverine C dynamics in a poorly understood region tropical Africa.
Below I point out a few key issues to address and make some recommendations for improving the narrative structure. In contrast, the goal of: [describing spatial and temporal variations in river C], absent any problem statement or hypothesis is not well-conceived and sets up a results section that is largely strings of facts.
There are plenty of significant patterns to be found in such a large data set, but what do they mean? How are they useful? What questions do they answer? Without any of this framing the reader is left wondering: what is the point of all this work and analysis? After re-reading these sections several times I had an idea of why this information was useful, but this was not so easy.
There is no problem with the mechanics writing few typos aside , but rather an issue of conceptualization and paragraph design. The discussion subsection topics similarly lack a thread holding them together. They give detailed glimpses into specific parts of the system: forest groundwater, headwater stream, catchment scale patterns… They could really us a narrative arc that ties them together—a clear objective or a question.
