Recognition and Prediction of Land Dynamics and Its Associated Impacts in Al-Qurayyat City and along Al-Shamal Train Pathway in Saudi Arabia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General This research clarifies the relationship between railway development and land use based on statistical methods and is an important study for considering sustainable land development. This manuscript deserves publication.

However, it needs to be modified a little.

Introduction: the authors have written the background of this research, however, the academic questions, what was not understood, and the importance of the study should be indicated easier to understand.

Results and Discussion: please include the limitation of this research. In detail, There are some double spaces throughout the text. Often no space is taken after the caption in the figure. Please follow the authors' guidelines.

There are some figure captions where the word "Figure" is not bold. The citation manners are not unified (there may or may not be a comma between the author’s name and the number of years), so the guidelines should be followed.

The reader cannot read the legend of Figure 1b.

P.3, line 98, In this case, it is better to put a period between the numbers instead of the comma.

P.4, line 145, there are two “in” P.7, line 213, P.8, line 215, P. 17 equation 6, P.18, 19 Figure 1 and 2, P. 19, line 443, please check P.8, lines 220-223, please make sure, especially the subscript P.9 equations 3 and 4, are there any explanations of NIR, Red, and SWIR?

Author Response

Thank you for your time and I’m greatly appreciating affording me the time to improve the manuscript efficiently. I have been addressed all your comments as presented below and I hope that I have manipulated all these comments in a satisfactory manner. Furthermore, new lines are added to the manuscript and highlighted the changes in the revised manuscript in green to facilitate tracking the changes. Deleted words and sentences are wrote using strikethrough property in MS-Word.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper intends to investigate the development for future land use/land cover planning in Al-Qurayyat City, concluding that urbanisation and soil consumption will impact the environmental sustainability. This statement should be better explained with international literature reference and with proposes/suggestion in order to improve sustainability. Without these specifications the findings of the paper appear more like a mere exercise than a research work. 

Author Response

I really appreciate your helpful and thoughtful comments which added positive values to this research. Let me discuss all your comments and inquiries. I carefully revised the manuscript point-by-point according to your comments. Furthermore, new lines and paragraphs were added to the manuscript and highlighted the changes in the revised manuscript in green to facilitate tracking the changes. Deleted words and sentences are wrote using strikethrough property in MS-Word.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The Title of the article is correct, clearly indicates the area of interest and the scientific issues undertaken. However, it is embedded in the field of social sciences, i.e. socio-economic geography and spatial management. This perspective determines its assessment in the context of pointing to critical urbanization changes conditioned by the development of logistics infrastructure (railway - Al-Qurayyat). However, signaling the "impact" obligated the authors to define both the "directions" and the "strength" of this impact. Therefore, in Abstract, in addition to indicating the urban changes taking place in Saudi Arabia, the transport rights related to the activation of the area (urbanization) in connection with the development of transport were confirmed. Hence, the strong urbanization of areas along the Al-Shamal railway route should be raised, rather than underlining as in the title "/ ... / Land Dynamics and its Associated Impacts on Al-Shamal Train / ... /". The content of the Abstract clearly indicates the research method used (Markov chain and CA-Markov model), the obtained results - statistical data analysis (increase in land development from 1.96% to 7.25% in 1989-2021) - forecasting according to the adopted research method (over 60% of the total area of ​​Al-Quryyat will be transformed into urban areas by 2030). By creating a useful "pattern of change" for the follow-up of planners and decision makers. However, the indicated terms, i.e. "intelligent development" and "sustainable development", will need to be developed in the literature.

In Keywords, it is worth considering the emphasis on: urbanization phenomena (discussed in the Introduction), railway transport infrastructure (also shown in the Introduction) and sustainable development. Accordingly, keywords can take the following form: sustainability, identification of land-use change / land cover change detection, image classification, application of the Markov chain model to change prediction. In the introduction, secondary statistical data indicating demographic and socio-economic changes are presented, and then in the research area (Al-Qurayyat City) the geo-administrative and historical characteristics of the facility as well as the methodology and data processing are well described, presenting many types of spatial and temporal data to temporal land use monitoring / land cover changes and urban expansion in 1989-2021 (Landsat-5 Thematic Mapper (TM), Landsat-7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper (ETM +) and 201 Landsat-8 Operational Land satellite imager (OLI) from 1985 , 2002, 2013 and 2021 from https: // earthex-203 plorer.usgs.gov). The most valuable in terms of science and research, with high cognitive value, is Part 4 - Results and Discussion, and especially the complementary study, Figure 14, which shows losses and gains in land use / cover in 2030. The authors showed very good knowledge of the technique research, using a quantitative and visualization approach. In conclusion, due to the dominant scientific narrative related to the optics of socio-economic geography and spatial management, this scientific article should be treated as a complement to the optics based on economy and management, undoubtedly enriching it with additional geographical aspects. Hence, however, it is necessary to develop and fill the visible gaps in the aspects of sustainable and intelligent development and aspects related to urbanization processes. They should be treated as an extension of the "background" because I see great publishing potential for this article, especially taking into account its: high methodological correctness, applied techniques and tools, area, horizon and scope of research, obtained results).

Author Response

I’d like to thank you for your comments which improves the research. I’ll try to introduce a discussion for your comments point-by-point. Additionally, I added new lines to the manuscript and highlighted them the in green to ease tracking them. Deleted words and sentences are wrote using strikethrough property in MS-Word.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf