Sustainability Interventions on Agro-Ecosystems: An Experience from Yunnan Province, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I would like to start by apologizing for being a little late with the review of the article.
The article is very well written and is relevant in the context of sustainable agriculture. The interventions that took place in the agroecosystem in Yunnan Province are presented and they could be useful in other places.
I recommend publishing the article
I made some comments in the attached file
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
We appreciate your supportive comments. Following your suggestion, we have revised the manuscript accordingly and corrected one typographical error (Line 245).
Q: Personally, I would not enter this key word (‘Sustainable Development Goals’)
ANS: we delete this key word. (Line 30).
Q: Why is this link not cited as a bibliographic source?
ANS: we have added all the four data sources that we used in this study into our reference list (No. 33, 50, 51 and 52). (Line 529-530, 566-571).
Reviewer 2 Report
Introduction:
A few improper/unprecise terms used when referring to the Green Revolution: adoption of improved varieties (35); “better water management” (36-37) is very general: better from what point of view?
45-52: unclear referencing.
61-64: not clear why you are bringing up the assessment tools. What are they used for? Are they relevant for agricultural production?
70: you claim that “this is due to the huge gap between …”. But this sentence is only repeating that there is a gap, it is not actually providing any information on what the gap is due to.
72-73: “the part of impact assessment is dominant”, rather than…? Your point doesn’t come across. What are you looking at that has been neglected in these studies? What is the research gap you are addressing? Please make it more explicit.
76: this last paragraph comes out of the blue with information on Yunnan. You could start this paragraph with a sentence on what this paper will look into, and then explain why Yunnan was chosen.
Materials and Methods:
Figure 1 and related text: unclear. There are many different boxes, arrows, colours used: what do they mean? Please add a legend and more information in the caption. Moreover, the framework is not very clear. What are the interactions between the agricultural and the ecological system? DO they have the same nutrient and water cycle? What about energy flows? Is there only agricultural output and no input (seeds, irrigation water, manure, fertilisers, labor, etc.)? How does the arrow with “Sustainable practices” end up on the arrow with “Negative impact”? And apart from the figure itself, about which many other points could be mentioned, how is agricultural system a “modified natural system”? What are the modifications? How do you consider the social and economic components of agricultural systems (which now seem to be completely outside of the system)? If you consider them outside, why? How do they interact with the system? How does the system impact them?
Table 1 and related text: the indexes are unclear. How is “Irrigation area” a variable for positive ecological impact? On what scale is the GDP calculated? What is plastic film used for? What is the reforestation area? What water reservoir are you referring to?
Table 2 and related text: what were the policies selected for? What did you do with them?
Results:
Well written but still difficult to follow, mainly because from the Introduction and Materials & Methods it is not really clear what you are looking into, why, and how.
Figure 2: really nice way to represent the dynamics of the indicators with the associated changes in policies.
Discussion:
Interesting overall, but a discussion on the limitations of your approach seems to be missing.
Author Response
We appreciate your insightful comments and constructive suggestions. We have incorporated the review comments and revised the manuscript thoroughly.
Introduction:
Q: A few improper/unprecise terms used when referring to the Green Revolution: adoption of improved varieties (35); “better water management” (36-37) is very general: better from what point of view?
ANS: To make our points more specific, we have changed the terms ‘adoption of improved varieties’ and ‘better water management’ to ‘crop genetic improvements’ and ‘effective water use’ respectively. (Line 35-37).
Q: 45-52: unclear referencing.
ANS: We have rearranged and have cited references for each sentence.
Q: 61-64: not clear why you are bringing up the assessment tools. What are they used for? Are they relevant for agricultural production?
ANS: We mentioned assessment tools here because they were used for evaluating the performance of agro-ecosystems, and our Agro-Ecological Sustainability Index (AESI) was also an assessment tool used to measure the system performance. Based on your comment and to make our text coherent, we have changed its sequential order (followed the sentence “conceptual frameworks were developed to …”) and added a term “to evaluate the performance of agro-ecosystems” to express its function. (Line 65-66)
Q: 70: You claim that “this is due to the huge gap between …”. But this sentence is only repeating that there is a gap, it is not actually providing any information on what the gap is due to.
ANS: We have added “as unclear implementation processes, incapable institutions, and unadaptable interventions often thwart implementation” to explain and specify the gap. (Line 71-73).
Q: 72-73: “the part of impact assessment is dominant”, rather than…? Your point doesn’t come across. What are you looking at that has been neglected in these studies? What is the research gap you are addressing? Please make it more explicit.
ANS: We have added “rather than providing intervention mechanism and actionable implementation experiences” to make our point explicit. (Line 75-76).
Q: 76: This last paragraph comes out of the blue with information on Yunnan. You could start this paragraph with a sentence on what this paper will look into, and then explain why Yunnan was chosen.
ANS: Following your suggestion, we have added “This study aims to present an intervention framework on agro-ecosystems and actionable implementation experience that help transform sustainability concepts into implementation actions” at the beginning of that paragraph. (Line 79-81).
Materials and Methods:
Q: Figure 1 and related text: unclear. There are many different boxes, arrows, colours used: what do they mean? Please add a legend and more information in the caption. Moreover, the framework is not very clear. What are the interactions between the agricultural and the ecological system? DO they have the same nutrient and water cycle? What about energy flows? Is there only agricultural output and no input (seeds, irrigation water, manure, fertilisers, labor, etc.)? How does the arrow with “Sustainable practices” end up on the arrow with “Negative impact”? And apart from the figure itself, about which many other points could be mentioned, how is agricultural system a “modified natural system”? What are the modifications? How do you consider the social and economic components of agricultural systems (which now seem to be completely outside of the system)? If you consider them outside, why? How do they interact with the system? How does the system impact them?
ANS: We appreciate your important point and we have accordingly modified Figure 1 and added more information in the legend and caption. In a simplified agro-ecosystem, the interaction between ecosystem and agricultural system is: “ecosystem provides serveries such as regulating and supporting for agricultural system, in return, agricultural system gives both positive and negative feedbacks to ecosystem”. Matter flow spans both ecosystem and agricultural system and forms nutrient and water cycles. We have added an icon in Figure 1 to demonstrate energy flow, which also spans ecosystem and agricultural system. We have added inputs as well as farm management into agricultural system. We have modified the text along the arrow connecting intervention and negative impact as “to reduce (such as sustainable practices)” to express its meaning clearly. (Line 133-137).
We have also added a sentence “modification of structure and functions through farming managements and external inputs, e.g., introducing crop, reshaping landscape, and changing nutrients dynamics” to explain that agricultural system is a modified natural system. (Line 122-124). We do not consider social-economic components in agro-ecosystems as the interventions in this study are mainly addressed on biophysical components, thus social-economic impacts are beyond this study. (Line 114-116).
Q: Table 1 and related text: the indexes are unclear. How is “Irrigation area” a variable for positive ecological impact? On what scale is the GDP calculated? What is plastic film used for? What is the reforestation area? What water reservoir are you referring to?
ANS: We have added explanation for some variables in Table 1 to make them clear. Although irrigation could have positive impact and negative impact, here for a dry place, expanding irrigation area means bringing more water to local systems and allocating water effectively, thus considered a positive impact. Agricultural GDP is calculated on provincial and prefectural scales. “Plastic film” here means “plastic mulch”, we have changed that word. “reforestation” here means “restore damaged woodland”. “Water reservoirs” are “fundamental infrastructures for hilly areas to collect and distribute water to cope with drought”.
Q: Table 2 and related text: what were the policies selected for? What did you do with them?
ANS: We have explained in the text that we select these policies “as the main interventions to study their effect on agro-ecosystems”. (Line 188-189).
Results:
Q: Well written but still difficult to follow, mainly because from the Introduction and Materials & Methods it is not really clear what you are looking into, why, and how.
ANS: This study aims to present an intervention framework on agro-ecosystems and actionable implementation experience that help transform sustainability concepts into implementation actions, due to lack of intervention mechanism and implementation process in literatures. In doing so, we first create an intervention framework and explain the intervention mechanism and implementation processes, and then formulate an Agro-Ecosystem Sustainability Index (AESI) to assess the effect of interventions on agro-ecosystems at provincial and prefectural levels. Finally, we highlight the key to a successful intervention in the Discussion section.
Q: Figure 2: Really nice way to represent the dynamics of the indicators with the associated changes in policies.
ANS: Thanks for your kind and supportive comment.
Discussion:
Q: Interesting overall, but a discussion on the limitations of your approach seems to be missing.
ANS: We have added two sentences to explain the limitation of our approach as follow; “The intervention framework in this study is generated from Yunnan’s agro-ecosystems and excludes social components. Thus, such interventions generated in this study may not be successful if attempted in other areas. Other users who intend to use a similar ap-proach to intervene in agro-ecosystems may need to modify the framework and choose indicators accordingly”. (Line 390-394).
Reviewer 3 Report
The article contains interesting conclusions on the monitoring of agricultural systems in the Yunan province of China. Using the example of these studies, when assessing the AESI indicator, the authors draw conclusions that may be useful for other provinces. Such research may contribute to the achievement of the full system of sustainable development. However, they also base their conclusions on the policies of local or local government authorities. In the chapter, the conclusions from lines 404 to 410 even postulate their conditions for improving the farm policy, which, although they result from the conducted analysis, but these theses should be formulated so that they apply only to the examined object. In their current wording, they suggest the need to improve the government's policy and may indicate that this improvement was achieved only thanks to support programs.
Author Response
Q: The article contains interesting conclusions on the monitoring of agricultural systems in the Yunnan province of China. Using the example of these studies, when assessing the AESI indicator, the authors draw conclusions that may be useful for other provinces. Such research may contribute to the achievement of the full system of sustainable development. However, they also base their conclusions on the policies of local or local government authorities. In the chapter, the conclusions from lines 404 to 410 even postulate their conditions for improving the farm policy, which, although they result from the conducted analysis, but these theses should be formulated so that they apply only to the examined object. In their current wording, they suggest the need to improve the government's policy and may indicate that this improvement was achieved only thanks to support programs.
ANS: We appreciate your supportive comments. With your kind guidance, we do hope that our methods and conclusion is useful for other places to intervene their agro-ecosystems. However, as you mentioned, our conclusions are based on the local context; therefore, we have added three sentences to explain the limitation as follow; “The intervention framework in this study is generated from Yunnan’s agro-ecosystems and excludes social components. Thus, such interventions generated in this study may not be successful if attempted in other areas. Other users who intend to use a similar approach to intervene in agro-ecosystems may need to modify the framework and choose indicators accordingly”. (Line 390-394).
Reviewer 4 Report
Please see the attached file
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
We appreciate your insightful comments and constructive suggestions. We have incorporated your review comments and revised the manuscript thoroughly.
Q: The first major concern regards the components of AESI, as presented in Table 1. In particular, the social component of sustainability (see line 58) seems to be partially lacking. In other words, issues like labor and health considerations, decent working conditions, social responsibility seem to be not fully taken into account. Such factors have been also highlighted by Van Cauwenbergh et al. (2007) (see Table 1 at page 235), that is the reference work for the AESI calculation in your articles. In this sense, the authors should take into consideration this aspect and discuss it.
ANS: although social component is very important in agro-ecosystems, the interventions in this study are mainly addressed on biophysical components and the data of social components at prefectural level are lacking, we therefore do not consider social components in our framework as well as in our assessment metrics (AESI). We have added five sentences in our text to explain why we do not consider social components (line 114-116) and to discuss the limitations (line 390-394).
In order to understand whether this might affect our results, we compared the result between AESI contained social factors (four indicators: teacher-student ratio, student enrolments, number of medical technicians per one thousand people, and labour efficiency (grain production divide by labour numbers)) and AESI uncontained social factors at provincial level. The result showed that the trends were similar (figure in attachment), which suggested that the interventions in this study were useful and our conclusions were sound.
Q: The second major concern is linked to the first and to the fact that the paper is lacking in considering the availability of the local stakeholders (e.g. farmers) to engage sustainability interventions on agro-ecosystems. First, the authors have to consider that off-farm income (through incentives) (see lines 365-367) is not the only motivation affecting farmers’ intention to adopt environmentally friendly practices (see for example Mozzato et al., 2018). In addition, authors should have in mind that the effectiveness of a conservation program relies not only on the duration of the program itself (lines 323-332), but also in the stakeholders’ availability to maintain the conservation practices in the long-run as pointed out also by Defrancesco et al. (2018); Gatto et al. (2019), and Pagliacci et al. (2020). This evidence should be taken into consideration and discussed by the authors.
ANS: we have added more sentences in the Discussion and Conclusion to consider farmer’s attitude, motivation, and their information sharing network: “enhancement of farmers’ positive attitude towards sustainable practices” (line 399), “it creates an information sharing network, changes individual’s motivation and attitudes toward sustainability, and connects supply and demand closely” (line 408-410), “and change people’s motivation and attitudes toward sustainability” (line 442). Two references (Pagliacci et al., 2020; Defrancesco et al., 2018) are also added. (line 628-632).
Q: Line 18 “We first create the intervention framework on agro-ecosystems in using a systematic approach, and then analyze the intervention mechanism”. I think the word “in” is not necessary.
ANS: we have deleted the word. (line 18).
Q: Lines 20-21, The sentence “We find that by integrating interventions we can reverse the sustainability trend from deterioration to recovery and improvement with a spatial difference” is not clear for me.
ANS: we have changed the sentence to “we can reverse the sustainability trend from deterioration to recovery and improvement, however, with a spatial difference” (line 21).
Q: Line 88-89, A description of the study area (i.e., the Yunnan Province) is needed, especiallyin relation to the agricultural and policy contexts.
ANS: we have added a paragraph to describe the study area in section 2.1: Study Area. (line 94-108).
Q: Figure 2B, Colors referring to the crops in the pie charts should be reported in the caption of the figure and not near one of the charts.
ANS: we have added a legend on the figure to show different crop areas with their corresponding colors.
Q: Line 216 “In the ‘high input high output’ phrase (2008-2012) …”. I think that there is a typo: “phrase” should be replaced by “phase”.
ANS: we have corrected the word. (line 245).
Q: Lines 253-254 The sentence “The stable crop planting areas since 2013 suggested that planting areas were not the main reason behind the improvement of system sustainability” is a discussion of a result and not a result itself.
ANS: it is indeed a discussion of the result, but there is no appropriate place in the Discussion section to put, so we just put this sentence here.
Q: Figure 3 The blue lines surrounding the analyzed Prefectures (Figure 3A) should be reported also in the other maps (i.e. Figure 3B, C, D, E). In order to make the maps more readable, I suggest also to use the same colors used in the lines of the chart 3F to edge the three Prefectures.
ANS: following your suggestion, we have highlighted three prefectures on all maps, and used different green colors to plot Figure3 F.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 4 Report
The Authors addressed the critical points I had evidenced in the first phase of the review.
However, Figure 3 is still not clear. I suggest to keep the colors used in the previous version of the manuscript for the lines of the chart 3F and to edge the three different Prefectures with these colours in all the maps (i.e. blue for BaoS, magenta for Yux, and yellow for WenS both in maps 3A-B-C-D-E and in chart 3F).
Author Response
Thank you for your kind comment. Following your suggestion, we use cyan, magenta, and yellow color to edge Baoshan, Yuxi, and Wenshan prefecture respectively in Figure 3.
