Accessibility Improvement and Renewal of Urban Park Green Space for the Elderly and the Disabled

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

forests-2570165-peer-review-v1

Assessing Urban Park and Green Space Accessibility and

Renewal : A Study Considering the Travel Characteristics of

 

Elderly and Disabled Residents

 

I have reviewed the manuscript and found that the subject is interesting and the aim of the contribution is clear.

The paper has merits for the scientific community interested in problems of assessing urban park and green space accessibility of elderly and disabled residents. Manuscript is well written and easy to follow.

Combining landscape architecture, environmental psychology, urban and rural planning, graph theory and operations research as methodological approach is succesfuly tested on case study of Jianye District of the Nanjing city, China.

Discussion and shortcomings in this study are well elaborated.

 

 

I recommend minor revision by enlarging the font size on all figures.

English can be improved.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to the Forests journal. Generally, the topic fits into the scope of the journal, and the structure respects Scientific Best Practice. Moreover, I enjoyed peer reviewing the manuscript because it is well written and on a scientifically good level.

Thus, I have only minor comments.

Please add the source and the status of the ArcGIS and Phyton.

Please explain, in which way are defined the elderly.

Please explain how was defined the 10-minute walk for the elderly and a 500-meter walk for the disabled to access parks and green spaces or provide a source for this assumption.

Please elaborate some details on the following statement: Fourthly, Due to some limitations of GIS software, the construction of the accessibility model is somewhat idealized to some extent and cannot simulate all factors in reality.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a competent manuscript.  It is very well written and presented.  There is a clear statement of intent and logical flow.  The figures and tables are professional and informative but perhaps very excessive in number.  Also, many are not legible unless enlarged considerably.  There is an extensive set of relevant references but with format inconsistencies.

It is a very unusual topic but important.  It is also marginal in relevance to a journal on forests but this issue is on urban green space.  The authors might justify why this study is relevant to this journal in the text.  Green space and park does not always imply forest cover.

The authors collected an extensive amount of data for complex analysis.  However the primary results on the importance of access by the elderly and disabled to green space are as expected.  There is little basic science but useful applied science.  The results are also likely site specific.

As with almost all manuscripts, there are some editorial suggestions as follow for consideration of the authors:

1.      The title could be shortened.

2.      Line 14, dotted and areal are not clear.

3.      Line 20, define elderly, greater than?

4.      Line 36, hot is poor word choice.  Important, frequent?

5.      Line 56, methods perhaps.

6.      There is some inconsistent use of serial commas.

7.      Line 128.  Perhaps two sentences, A sperate reference to Fig. 1.

8.      The text in Fig. 1 is difficult to read both in font size and the white format.  Similar issues exist with other figures.

9.      Figure 2 needs some area/scale information especially for the study area.

10.   Line 206, space between figures?

11.   Table captions end with period and not.

12.   Line 255, : or .?

13.   Equation 4 needs introduction.

14.   Figure 18, upper case for The Elderly?

15.   Table 14 caption, space t?

16.   There are format inconsistencies in the references.  Article titles use upper case or not to begin words.  Journal titles are in italics or not, in upper case or not etc.

As stated, this is a competent manuscript but complex. Some of the tables and figures might be deleted.  It deserves publication but Forests does seem to be an unusual outlet.

Minor edits only.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx