Statistical Approach to Assess Chill and Heat Requirements of Olive Tree Based on Flowering Date and Temperatures Data: Towards Selection of Adapted Cultivars to Global Warming

Comment: After reviewing we made the following changes:

- We added the sentence: “Our investigations provided first insights to select adapted cultivars to global warmings” (see page 1)

- We added the information: “the soil is characterized by clay loam texture” (see page 3)

- We described representative cultivars of the four chill groups in the Table 3 as following: “Arbequina (spanish cultivar largely cultivated in the world), Picholine marocaine (single dominant cultivar in Morocco), Rossello (local italian cultivar present in Tuscany), Leccino (main Italian cultivar) (El Bakkali et al., 2019)” (see page 11)

- We added the country of origin for the Pessl Instruments GmbH “Austria” (see page 3)

- Page 1, line 40: replace “It mainly involved” with “It is mainly involved”; It’s done (see page 1)

- Page 2, line 91: please, specify the CRS (coordinate reference system)We added the information: “CRS: WGS84-EPSG:4326” (see page 2)

- Page 3, line 121: please, specify the equation applied by the chillR package to derive the hourly dataWe added the following explanation: “ChillR implements the two following equations (Linvill, 1990) … Differences in daylenth between locations are accounted by computing sunrise and sunset times based on geographic latitude using chillR package [32]” (See page 3)

- Page 4, line 169: it is not clear what period the generated dataset of hourly temperatures covers (1972 to 2019, as reported here or 1972 to 2012, as reported in line 121?; )We revised as follows: “the generated dataset of hourly temperature during the period from 1972 to 2012 and the registered dataset from 2013 to 2019  were analyzed using the chillR package.” (see page 5)

- Page 5, line 190: “therefore” is repeated; We removed “therefore” (see page 5)

- Page 5, line 193- 194: the sentence from “Positive model….day delay bloom” is not clear. In addition, with the aim to improving readability, I suggest better explaining the signs of coefficients, as in the cited paper of Rojo et al. 2020 [9]: …positive coefficients imply that the temperatures (…) were positively correlated with the flowering dates, i.e., lower temperatures during winter lead to earlier flowering dates (equivalent to the chilling accumulation period). In contrast, negative coefficients signify that the temperatures were negatively correlated with the flowering dates, i.e., higher temperatures in spring also contribute to earlier flowering (equivalent to the forcing period); We revised this paragraph as follows: “Positive coefficients imply that the temperatures on these days were positively correlated with the flowering dates, i.e., lower temperatures during winter lead to earlier flowering dates (equivalent to the chilling accumulation period). In contrast, negative coefficients signify that the temperatures were negatively correlated with the flowering dates, i.e., higher temperatures in spring also contribute to earlier flowering (equivalent to the forcing period). This is consistent with the notion of chill requirements, according to which warm temperatures should delay the dormancy breaking and thus lead to later flowering.” (see page 5)

- Page 6, line 243: it is not Fig. S3: maybe it is Fig. S1; We replaced Fig. S3 by Fig. S6 (see page 6)

- Page 12, line 421: please, consider moving figure S10 from Supplementary materials to the paper, it can improve the readability. We moved the Figure S10 from Supplementary materials to the main paper as Figure 7 (see page 12)

- Page 13, line 444: replace “ovoid” with “avoid”; It’s done (see page 13)

- Page 13, line 451: replace Links with “links”; It’s done (see page 13)

- Page 21, line 900: this reference is duplicated (see [9]); We removed the duplicated reference (see page 21)

Note that this article is now published, therefore some changes with regards to English editing and some minor changes have been done.