Evolution of Ecological Patterns of Poyang Lake Wetland Landscape over the Last One Hundred Years Based on Historical Topographic Maps and Landsat Images
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors,
The manuscript presents an important study of evolution of ecological patterns of Poyang Lake wetland landscape over the last one hundred. It is an excellent manuscript, I only have a little suggestions. It is recommended to place the references of the programs you used, for example:
McGarigal, K.; Marks, B.J. FRAGSTATS: Spatial Pattern Analysis Program for Quantifying Landscape Structure; U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station: Portland, OR, USA, 1995. Available online: https://www.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/pubs/3064
McGarigal, K.; Cushman, S.A.; Neel, M.C.; Ene, E. FRAGSTATS: Spatial Pattern Analysis Program for Categorical Maps; University of Massachusetts: Amherst, MA, USA, 2002; Available online: https://www.umass.edu/landeco/
Environmental Systems Research Institute. ArcGIS Desktop; ESRI: Redlands, CA, USA, 2018; Available online: https://desktop.arcgis.com/es/
Lines 163-170: Reference research that has used similar landscape metrics, The following manuscripts can be helpful: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijgi9100583, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2017.12.143
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors carried out an analysis of wetlands long term changes in a Chinese area. The work describes variation of wetlands in terms of area take into account three dates (1930s, 1970s, 2020s. Moreover, landscape indexes were used to measure variations of wetland patterns. The results showed a general decreasing trend of wetlands area with spatial differences. The analysis of landscape indexes highlighted an increasing wetland fragmentation and shpe simplification, due to the creation of new aritificial wetlands.
Overall, the work has some value for international audience, even though it could benefit from improvements.
in my opinion, the main flaws is the lack of wetland quality assessment. Wetland loss is a major concern worldwide but increasing attention is paid also on the decrease of their quality. This aspect was not considered in this study and should, at least, discussed in the text. For example, aquatic vegetation status is an important issue for wetlands functionality, being at the basis of several ecological processes. The loss of aquatic vegation can also be detected using remote sensing technics, as those used in this study,
See for example, Gaglio et al. 2022 https://doi.org/10.3390/w14010117
in general, more international references are suggested. The majority of them listed in bibliography are related from chinese studies.
Other minor comments:
- abstract: the results of Fragstat indices are presented in lines 20-29, but not introduced before when presenting methods of analysis.
- section 2.4: I suggest to insert a table to present and describe landscape indexes and their meaning
- line 131-137: It is not clear to me. Do you mean that the images were georeferenced in GIS using landmarks?
- fig.1: the four panels are not mentioned in the caption
- I suggest to change fig.6 using another chart type. I think that, as it stand, the figure is not informative
- in general, I would expect to read some management implications derived from the analysis
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors improved significantly their work, including qualitative assessment and better explaining issues that were unclear before.
I suggest the manuscript for publication
