Determining the Weightage of Visual Aesthetic Variables for Permanent Urban Forest Reserves Based on the Converging Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It was a pleasure to read this manuscript. I see it as an innovative work (I refer to the weighting of the variables). It is well-designed, well-conducted, well-written and well-presented study. Failed to find even a typo.

My only comment is about the concept of refuge, which is mentioned but, in my perception, is not discussed sufficiently. The authors seem to incorporate this quality in "Openness", which leaves me a bit puzzled. Refuge in many contexts can be contrary to openness. I wish the authors explain this point a bit more convincingly.

I have no other specific comment.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

your paper presents interesting research on combining inputs from the public and professionals to design an operational tool for assessing visual quality of urban forests. I have a few general comments on the paper, which are mostly directed into improving clarity and some detailed comments. All are given below, I suggest you review them and take them into consideration as much as you see possible.

General comment 1:

The research flow is described in detail in section 2, with additional figure 1, which outlines the concept of the study - I think this is very beneficial for the reader. However, some parts are hard to understand, and this reflects in the result section too. The most unclear to me is how are two specific phases done by professional public - visual aesthetic assessment based on expert survey decisions, and AHP step. It is not entirely clear how does the first one feed the second one (or does it not). I suggest to write this more clear. How does use of 1-5 Likert scale (expressing importance of variables) in first phase relate AHP pairwise comparisons where experts rate relative importance again?

Detailed comment 1a: lines 188-189This sentence is not clear. How was this description of images asked for?

Detailed comment 1b: chapters 2.4.1, 2.4.2, 2.4.3

This is description of a very commonly used AHP approach and this might be omitted entirely or at least shrotened.

General comment 2:

There is no information on how the sample of the general public was selected. Forest visitors, students, someone else ...? Please add some information on that.

General comment 3:

Clarity of results could be improved.

Detailed comment 3a: Fig. 4 has a part showing 'Grouping' - what exactly does this refer to? Why is it needed?

Detailed comment 3b: Table 6 and to some extent Table 7 are intermediate / final outputs of the AHP procedure. You might wish to reconsider if all this data really needs to be presented so that it does not overburden the text with information not necessary for the reader.

General comment 4: the titles

Detailed comment 4a: The main title seem too long and refers to methodological approach (e.g. AHP), which is not novel and thus might not need to be highlighted.

Detailed comment 4b: some titles describing sections of methodology seem to be unnecessarily complicated; decision making based on expert survey assessment (2.3), and validation of the data classification based on expert survey decision-making (3.3). Reconsider them and try to use simpler and more straightforward titles.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In general, this manuscript is well written and addresses a topic of general interest:  how highly members of the public value different aspects of natural areas in terms of esthetic preferences.

A better justification of the variables would be helpful in some cases.  For example, why is 'coherence' of value?  And what 'fundamental needs' are the authors discussing?  Most humans do not meet fundamental needs (i.e. food and shelter) in forest remnants.

The authors do not closely consider any conservation/biodiversity impacts of the preferred esthetics, but should do so, particularly given that they point out that there are few forests left in the region in which they performed this study.  They recommend enhancing the 'visual aesthetics' in urban forest reserves, for example, without mentioning the possibility of educating the public to recognize the value of biodiversity and the features that lead to higher biodiversity.  As urban parks are typically used for multiple purposes, including education about local fauna and flora, as well as refuges for at least some hardy species, this aspect of the consequences of esthetic changes should be considered.  Further, someone educated about features that promoted biodiversity is likely to have higher value for such features and thus potentially to find them more aesthetically pleasing.

Another difficulty with this paper is the low sample size of participants.  Although the 12 participants took a large number of photographs (750, or 62 images on average), 12 is a very small number of subjects and the 750 photos give an allusion of a large sample size, which is not the case.  Further, a reader has no idea of the distribution of photos across the participants, and thus no sense of whether the preferences were biases by a few highly productive photographers or were general across all participants.  At the least the range of the number of photographs taken by individual photographers should be provided, as well as mean and standard error.

L. 345:  Unclear:  reword.

L. 352-53.  Clarify.  Does this mean that a 'water element' was ranked second in visual appeal by the study participants?

l. 367.  Please use a spell checker to verify that typos have been eliminated throughout the manuscript.  Here the word should be 'process' instead of 'proces.'

To improve the clarity of Table 2, put horizontal lines between categories (e.g. legibility, mystery, etc.).  Horizontal lines would also make Tables 3 & 5 easier to read.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The minor revisions that you made were useful.  I enjoyed reading this paper.