The Impact of Land Use Change on Water-Related Ecosystem Services in the Bashang Area of Hebei Province, China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript „The Impact of Land Use Change on Water-Related Ecosystem Services in the Bashang Area of Hebei Province, China“ is an interesting and relevant contribution to the field of land use change and ecosystem services science. In my opinion, this paper suits well into the scope of the Journal. It is methodologically sound and well-written. Some issues which need to be adressed:

1) References in the text are not quoted correctly.

2) Abstract – The abstract doesn’t contain information about originality/novelty. The abstract must state the overarching originality or main novelty as well as the purpose of the study in two or three sentences.

3) Please find such words which are not in the title, this way search engines of the web will find your manuscript with higher probability.

4) In context about InVEST model see also research https://doi.org/10.3390/rs12071103 , and https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2020.138776

5) Can you recommend what areas show the most promise or what need more research?

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents an evaluation of 3 ecosystem services (ES) related to water ecosystems in different scenarios (past, real and designed) with different land use structures. The authors use the INVEST model to assess the ES and propose a new indicator to evaluate the future scenarios, the Average Ecology Effect (AEE). However, as the authors said, the results are not validated, even not for this new indicator that is proposed. In addition, the authors did not state why their study is interesting beyond the case study, since the discussion and the conclusions are centred on the implications of the results for the study area, mostly for policy-making.

Therefore, although the study is correct and well presented, the authors need to rewrite their discussions and conclusions to go beyond their study case. Why this study is interesting worldwide? How does it contribute to scientific community? If the main contribution of the study is the AEE indicator, the authors need to convince the readers about the validity and usefulness of this indicator.

Besides this main concern about the scientific soundness of the publication, I also suggest some minor changes below:

Title: The title is what it is, a title for a case study application. However, the title should advance the novelty of the publication (maybe the AEE indicator?)

Abstract: The abstract is too long, abstract longer than 250 words are less read in the scientific databases. I believe 200 words is ideal for an abstract.

Introduction: The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment made a great contribution to the ES concept and I believe it is correct to use this reference to define the concept. But it is 15 years old, thus there are more current reports to inform about the degradation of ES (e.g. IPBES, IUCN…).

The authors state that high-level land use intensity is related to a decrease in ES flows. However, this is not exactly true with some services. For instance, food provision increases with intensive agriculture. I believe this is worthy to mention since this is one of the main weaknesses of the ES concept (not all ES are directly related to ecosystem functions but to human interactions, sometimes with tradeoffs with ecosystems themself).

There is a weird jump in paragraph starting in line 83. The introduction is telling the strengths and weaknesses of scenario analysis and suddenly it jumps to the case study. Indeed, this is part of the publication being a case study application, you need to rethink the structure of the paper to highlight your contributions to the worldwide scientific community and not just to the policy-making of your case.

Material and methods: I don’t feel confident enough with INVEST model and the equations, so I trust the opinion of the other reviewers.

Results: The figure 4 is hard to interpret. Showing relative values (increment or decrement regarding baseline) would make easier the interpretation.

Discussion and conclusions: They are written like a report for policy-making instead of a scientific paper. The discussions and conclusions should discuss your contribution using a global perspective, why this is interesting for people analysing similar issues in other areas? Recommendations for policy-making are useful for practitioners and politicians in your study area but they are not interesting for a scientific who wants to apply the INVEST model in other area.

Since the AEE indicator is not validated using field data or other methods, discussion should compare these results with similar results in other studies to check if AEE results make sense.

That's all. I hope my contributions would be welcome.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf