Georesources as an Alternative for Sustainable Development in COVID-19 Times—A Study Case in Ecuador

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

The reviewed manuscript is an attempt to relate various types of geological resources in the assessment approach. This attempt should be appreciated, and it is of international importance. Although some ideas are a bit chaotic and need to be fixed with future investigations, this manner of writing is unavoidable for this pioneering research and does not diminish the value of the latter. Although my general opinion of this work is positive, I see some aspects for improvements.

1)    Abstract and key words: please, indicate the country of study.

2)    Figure 1: why geoheritage is judged non-renewable? In fact, its exploitation does not mean its depletion in many cases.

3)    Introduction: please, formulate your objective more clearly.

4)    Your subsection 1.1 should become the section 2 "Geographical and Geological Setting". There is no need to split it into subsections.

5)    Section 2 can be named only "Methodology". Are you sure that the Brilha's method may work in Ecuador perfectly? If you consider ecosystem services, you MUST consider and cite the works by Robert Costanza. Please, note that this specialist has updated recently his concept, and, thus, some "fresh" papers by him should be addressed.

6)    Section 3.5: the word "tsunami" occurs twice in the name.

7)    Do I understand correctly that mineral resources are scarce in the study area? What about ores?

8)    You can write a bit about the consumers of these resources. For instance, who may be geotourists, who may explore the educational potential of these georesources?

9)    Discussion: please, provide all monetary expressions in both national currency and USD.

10)    The literature is comprehensive, but I ask you to cite the following 4 related works elsewhere in the Introduction:

- Ruban, D.A., Sallam, E.S., Khater, T.M., Ermolaev, V.A., 2021. Golden Triangle Geosites: Preliminary Geoheritage Assessment in a Geologically Rich Area of Eastern Egypt. Geoheritage 13 (3): 54.

- Sallam, E.S., Ruban, D.A., Mostafa, M.T., Elkhodery, M.KH., Alwilily, R.L., Molchanova, T.K., Zorina, S.O., 2020. Unique desert caves as a valuable geological resource: first detailed geological heritage assessment of the Sannur Cave, Egypt. Arabian Journal of Geosciences 13: 141.

--My best wishes--

Author Response

Title: Georesources as an alternative for Sustainable Development in COVID-19 times. A study case in Ecuador

By: Authors

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their contributions to our manuscript. We think that the incorporation of the recommended suggestions has improved the quality of it.

Point-by-point response to the reviewers:

All referee’s comments are answered below, and changes are included in the revised version of the manuscript. We have highlighted them by using the “yellow colour”.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

REVIEW STATEMENT

JOURNAL: Sustainability

PAPER TITLE:   Georesources as an Alternative for Sustainable Development in COVID-19 Times. A Study Case in Ecuador

 This is a very worthy topic about an intersting case study,

 I find this manuscript is balanced and consistent,

 May it is advised to provide some concrete examples of how covid has impacts on local tourism

Regarding figure 5 it is better to provide them with higher resolution

Summary statement: a very worthy subject.

Author Response

Title: Georesources as an alternative for Sustainable Development in COVID-19 times. A study case in Ecuador

By: Authors

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their contributions to our manuscript. We think that the incorporation of the recommended suggestions has improved the quality of it.

Point-by-point response to the reviewers:

All referee’s comments are answered below, and changes are included in the revised version of the manuscript. We have highlighted them by using the “yellow colour”.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors

Please see in atach the comments and suggestions.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Title: Georesources as an alternative for Sustainable Development in COVID-19 times. A study case in Ecuador

By: Authors

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their contributions to our manuscript. We think that the incorporation of the recommended suggestions has improved the quality of it.

Point-by-point response to the reviewers:

All referee’s comments are answered below, and changes are included in the revised version of the manuscript. We have highlighted them by using the “yellow colour”.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The manuscript includes an interesting attempt of stimulation of sustainable use of geological resources to broaden the economic possibilities of local community struggling with the COVID-19 pandemics conditions and related reduction of tourist arrivals. I suggest improving the discussion and providing more detail on the promotional and communication efforts in local communities, which would increase the level of involvement of local stakeholders. I also suggest improving the access to the source data (as supplementary materials). As a non-native I cannot comment on the quality of English, but I listed below the typographic errors I have found. My comments are divided into the most important ("The merits"), less important, but nevertheless improving the quality and scientific soundness of the papers ("Detailed comments"), and a list of typos. Apart from these issues the manuscript is well-written and I have read it with pleasure and interest.

The merits

line 23 (abstract) and lines 181-188 - You selected assessment method introduced by Brilha, 2016 [27], which according to me is a reasonable decision. However, I would recommend adding a sentence or two to subchapter 2.2.1, in which you would explain the rationale behind your decision. Please remember that although widely used, the method of Brilha is not yet accepted by all scholars who are working on inventorying the geodiversity. Moreover, the method is designed to enable the evaluation of geosites and geodiversity sites, but your work goes well beyond that as you are evaluating all georesources available in the study area.

lines 281-285 - Again, I recommend adding a sentence that would justify your choice of GtRAM method. It will be much easier than in the case of method by Brilha, because the applications of GtRAM are limited to the georoute evaluation and the algorithm is quite unique (although note that in the paper you refer to as [151] a comparative analysis of methods designed to evaluate the geoeducational potential is done).

Table 3 and Figure 6; Figure 14 - These figures and table show the results of site evaluation. However, the details of the assessment are hidden and the reader has no access to them. See results of geosite assessment in Table 3: you have chosen the method by Brilha, which means that you assigned the values to parameters A-G (how many points? according to Brilha, maximum result is 7x4). The reader sees only the final result and is not able to figure out the exact outcome of the method (does the final result is determined by the rarity, or by the level of scientific knowledge, other parameter?). The same applies to Figure 14 and GtRAM method. I recommend giving access to unprocessed data, for example submitted as Supplementary Material 1 (for Table 3/Figure 6) and 2 (for Figure 14). It is possible that the readers will find some interesting patterns in your data and give some suggestions that are not immediately clear and obvious, so that you could benefit from their comments.

lines 390-406 and Table 7 - You describe here the KFM method. However, this is a chapter in which the results are shown. In my opinion this should be moved to subchapter 2.3.1 (in the methods section).

lines 514-516 - You state that there is a possibility of successful scientific communication at different levels of education. If you have any specific experiences with promoting the georesources studied in this contribution, I would definitely suggest sharing them here, in the discussion chapter.

lines 562-565 and 579-580 - Here you point out the current bottlenecks and difficulties related to the improvements in usage of raw resources in the production, and in the stimulating their use by local communities. Are there any ongoing or planned actions that can improve the situation and raise awareness among the stakeholders? You could also give some references to earlier works in which such problems were addressed, if you know any.

lines 562-569 - In the title, abstract and introduction you refer to COVID-19 pandemic conditions and suggest that sustainable use of georesources contributes to the reverse of the negative economic effects. For me, it would be very interesting to see the strategies that you applied in order to make sure that all stakeholders are interested in the use of geological resources that you study. Of course, the limited tourist activity can itself be a sufficient stimulus to search for other ways to diversify the economic profile of the study area, but in the conclusions you reveal that you have already done much to stimulate the interest in local communities (see lines 604-609). However, I haven't found more details in the discussion and/or the results. I would be grateful for more details on project website or virtual tours (line 604) if there are any; for details on trainings for local communities (line 606), and for details on cooperation between organisations. Sure, this is not a direct outcome of the study, but think of the readers who are interested primarily in the possible gains for the communities which struggle to overcome the adverse effects of COVID-19. If you are unsure what can be interesting here, take look at Wolniewicz, 2022, where an interactive map of geological attractions is used to direct tourists to places other than museums, which were still available during lockdown. The aim was to direct tourists who have just lost most obvious destinations in an urban environment. Your case study refers to rural environment, thus it is much different, but it would be very interesting to read more details regarding your promotional and communication efforts, either completed or planned, plans regarding trainings and cooperation with local communities. Such information fits well to the discussion chapter.

line 580 - At the end of the discussion you could also add a short note in which you explain how this work improves the methods and results obtained in recent paper [173], in which similar methods are used (GtRAM), the study area is located in Ecuador and and references to COVID-19 conditions are also made.

Detailed comments

line 23 - You have also used the GtRAM method of georoute evaluation, please mention it here.

lines 46-48 - Are you sure that high scientific value is required to assign the natural asset to georesources? For me, your definition refers to geoheritage, not georesources. I recommend finding other definitions of georesource (if there is any other than a simple statement that these are "geological resources"). Note that the paper you refer to, namely [6], does not provide a clear definition of georesources.

line 56 - "other geomorphological features" - Are you sure that all geomorphological features are non-renewable? Note that anthropogenetic landforms are also of interest for geomorphologists, and such forms are definitely renewable.

lines 61-62 - Geosites are defined here as elements that have tourist, cultural or scientific value. You refer to Brilha [27], but note that in the definition published there geosites are "geodiversity elements with high scientific value". No other value (tourist, cultural, other) can replace this requirement. You can therefore omit tourist and cultural value from your definition, if you decide to follow the paper [27].

line 67 - "Geoheritage or geological heritage is a fundamental part of cultural heritage" - Are you sure that geoheritage is included in cultural heritage? Please make sure if this sentence can be left in its present form, because I am concerned that this is at least questionable. For example, Reynard and Brilha state that "mining heritage is at the interface between geoheritage (georesource) and cultural heritage" indicating that these two are not joined together. On the other hand, there are papers which describe the anthropogenic geodiversity as the concept that links two separate areas of natural and cultural diversity (e.g. Kubalíková et al., 2017, 2019; Kubalíková and Zapletalová, 2021). Thus, I think that you should place a boundary between natural and cultural diversity.

line 119 - It seems that the Libertador Bolívar river is not shown in Fig. 2.

line 166 - "Brilha method for geosites" - Add a reference to [27] here.

lines 174-179 - You describe the methods used to compile an inventory of georesources. In the text you mention field trips, but no references to earlier sources are given: for example, to geological maps, earlier geological studies. Does it mean that you mapped rock outcrops noted in lines 178-179 during field trips, or there any cartographic sources involved (the title of 2.1 suggest that there are)?

Table 3 and Figure 6 - Table and figure show the same data. We have a redundancy here. Either remove the figure or, preferably, the table (figure is more appealing to a reader).

Table 3 - All geosites / potential geosites are shown in Fig. 4a), but thse located along the coast are poorly visible. Consider adding an inlet which would show the coast in more detail, with geosites shown (beaches and viewpoints).

Figure 7 - Different sizes of boxes representing sandy and clay resources suggest that significant volumes of sand are available, whereas clay deposits are much smaller. If this is true, you should supplement the legend with information regarding the interpretation of the sizes/volumes.

line 593 - "high scientific assessment between 155 and 210 points" - According to which method? This is a conclusion section, we have to be strict here and name the method.

Typography and editing issues

line 35 - "proposal ." - please remove excessive space.

line 78 - "contributes reduces poverty standards" - Probably some words should be removed or replaced to make this statement clear.

lines 91-93 - Rock types are not limited to granite, basalt, slate and schist; the same applies to Au and Ag as mineral resources. I am not a native, but I think that you should use "e.g." instead of "i.e.".

line 109 - zeolite has properties that are used in environment - You should name the uses of zeolites more precisely (what do you mean by "environment"?).

lines 123-124 - You repeat the sentence from lines 108-109. This repetition should be removed.

line 138 - "38,830.00" - Do you mean "thirty eight thousand eight hundred thirty"? If yes, then remove the decimal places. It is not possible to have a half of the resident.

line 262 - "was employed" - "were employed"

lines 417 - "water, air, waste ," - please remove excessive space.

line 434 - "Ardea alba )" - add italics here and remove unnecessary space.

line 435 - "Centropomus armatus" - please use italics here.

line 435 - use "Uca sp." in italics instead of "uca sp".

line 583 - "critical situation during COVID-19. So as not to" - I am not a native, but it seems to me like these two sentences should be merged into one.

line 890 - use "Mining Area—Case Study" instead of "Mining Area—Case Study".

lines 925-926 - use "Zanjan and Hamadan area, northern Iran" instead of "zanjan and hamadan area, northern iran".

References

Kubalíková L, Kirchner K, Bajer A (2017) Secondary geodiversity and its potential for urban geotourism: a case study from Brno city, Czech Republic. Quaestiones Geographicae 36:63–73.

Kubalíková L, Kirchner K, Kuda F, Machar I (2019) The role of anthropogenic landforms in sustainable landscape management. Sustainability 11:4331.

Kubalíková L, Zapletalová D (2021) Geo-cultural aspects of building stone extracted within Brno City (Czech Republic): a bridge between natural and cultural heritage. Geoheritage 13:78

Reynard, E., & Brilha, J. (2018). Geoheritage: a multidisciplinary and applied research topic. In Geoheritage (pp. 3-9). Elsevier.

Wolniewicz, P. (2022). Classification and Quantification of Urban Geodiversity and Its Intersection with Cultural Heritage. Geoheritage, 14(2), 1-29.

Author Response

Title: Georesources as an alternative for Sustainable Development in COVID-19 times. A study case in Ecuador

By: Authors

The authors would like to thank the reviewers for their contributions to our manuscript. We think that the incorporation of the recommended suggestions has improved the quality of it.

Point-by-point response to the reviewers:

All referee’s comments are answered below, and changes are included in the revised version of the manuscript. We have highlighted them by using the “yellow colour”.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf