Multitemporal Spatial Analysis of Land Use and Land Cover Changes in the Lower Jaguaribe Hydrographic Sub-Basin, Ceará, Northeast Brazil

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I accept the authors' replies and agree with the modifications made to the manuscript, which have improved its overall coherence and clarity. I recommend to accept the article for publication.

Author Response

Please see the attached document

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The paper entitled "Multitemporal spatial analysis of land use and cover in the Lower Jaguaribe hydrographic sub-basin, Ceará, Brazil" is a study based on a rigorous and robust methods. The discussion is correct and the overall approach is consistent.

It is a high quality work and does not need major changes.

Nevertheless, it is important to make small modifications so that the study achieves greater coherence. Thus, a minor revision is proposed.

The following changes are exposed:

a) It is important to include more bibliographic references to contextualize the study. One possibility is to write a longer introduction, or even add a new section (2. Theoretical framework) between the Introduction and Materials & Methods.

b) More detailed conclusions are also required. Although they are correct, it is important that they contain more accurate information from the research. A paragraph on furthered research would also be appreciated.

c) I invite the authors to rewrite the title. For example, it is more correct 'land use and land cover change' than of 'land use and cover'. It would also be necessary to include the geographic reference in parentheses, as well as its location (northeast, NE). For example: ...hydrographic sub-basin (Ceará, NE Brazil).

Authors are encouraged to correct these deficiencies for a high-quality paper.

Best regards,

Reviewer

Author Response

Please see the attached document

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In the manuscript, the authors investigate the land use and land cover changes of the Lower Jaguaribe hydrographic sub-basin in Ceará, Brazil. While it is a typical case study, it highlights the global problem, that more and more of the world's remaining natural areas must be sacrificed to meet our food and industrial raw material needs. Their results show that the development of agriculture - in this case, shrimp farms - has negative environmental impacts that need to be addressed to achieve a sustainable state.

The manuscript is structured logically but the content of some sections is inadequate. The methods used are appropriate to analyze the land cover change of the study area. The research results are well embedded in the various findings of the international literature. The manuscript is readable and well-illustrated, I recommend its acceptance after a minor revision.

Recommendations to the authors:

The content of the 'Introduction' section is largely inadequate. I suggest that in the first part of the introduction the authors place the topic under study in an international context (which the authors have done in the discussion), i.e. the occupation of natural and semi-natural areas by agriculture and its positive (e.g. boosting local economies) and negative (e.g. loss of biodiversity) effects. Then, I suggest narrowing the spatial focus to Brazil and then briefly to the study area. Here, I would suggest explaining the research questions and then why the authors think the specific study area is appropriate to answer them.

Part of the text in the introduction can be moved to section 2.1 to introduce the study area.

I suggest taking out the beginning of Section 2 (from lines 76 to 80 and Fig. 1), as those lines are just hanging in the air, they should be added to the appropriate part of the methodological description, which I think is the beginning of subsection 2.2. After all these changes, section 2.1 could be used as a starting point for section 2, with the introduction to the study area.

I recommend moving lines from 119 to 121 to subsection 2.2.2, where they belong in terms of content.

I suggest changing the title of section 3.1 to 'Spatiotemporal analysis of land use’.

Line 176 - change the letter L at the beginning of land cover to lower case.

In the ‘Conclusions’, authors are encouraged to mention their future research plans on the topic in at least one sentence.

Reviewer 2 Report

This study generated a spatial-temporal analysis of vegetation index and LULC using remotely sensed images from Landsat processed using GIS in in the Lower Jaguaribe sub-basin, Ceará, Brazil.  The author reaches some useful results.  However, the following problems should be considered.  (1) One significant problem of this study is that the classification of LULC from RS data only has only 6 classes, i.e., water bodies (including aquaculture), sand bodies (dunes), bare soil, caatinga trees, caatinga shrubs, and agriculture.  So aquaculture, especially shrimp farms, cannot be separated from other water bodies. Therefore, results of this study cannot fully support the conclusions.  (2) The climate data of the study area is of October, but the Landsat image is of August and September.  Climate data of the same months or more months should be provided. (3) The section of 2.2.3. Validation should be condensed. It's unnecessary to explain all common concepts. (4) Replacing map coordinates using LON/LAT maybe more friendly to readers.

Reviewer 3 Report

Please see the attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf