Progress in Ecosystem Health Research and Future Prospects

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript provides some useful information for ecosystem health assessment with a literature review, however, there are also several issues that need further explanation by the author:

1. "Ecosystem health" is indeed an uncontroversial term. However, some literatures also use the words such as "ocean health" or "ecological and environmental health". Only using "ecosystem health" may leave out some key literatures. different terms may lead to differences in the selection of evaluation frameworks and indicators. For example, the evaluation framework of "ocean health" is mainly based on ecosystem services and has been widely used at global, regional and local scales. However, this paper obviously does not pay attention to these studies. 

2. Under the multiple impacts of climate change and human activities, many ecosystems have undergone the regime shifts. Therefore, ecosystem health may also need to consider tipping points or thresholds. Please explain how to determine the level of ecosystem health in existing literature? This is of great help to ecosystem health from concept to practice. 

3. For biological indicators or indicator system methods, how are the reference standards (or good conditions) for each indicator determined in the existing literature? 

4. For the analysis of literature, much writing is focused on the changes in the number of literature, lacking the summary of the applicability of methods, scale effects and characteristic indicators for different ecosystem. 

 

5. Lines 504: “Against the background of the new era”, What does this "new era" means?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper presents Progress in Ecosystem Health Research. The paper could be interest to the scientific community through the topic addressed. Even though the manuscript clear, relevant for the field and presented in a well-structured manner, I have some comments.

 I strongly recommend, the use of third person pronouns and not the use of “I” or “you” or “we”

 The authors must provide evidences where the results are directly useful and applicable

 The authors should provide more references in the first 2 paragraph of Introduction to support their findings

 Line 36: “It can also provide a variety of ecosystem services for human beings” Could the authors provide more details regarding this.

 Line 422: “We reviewed the research content and development trends of ecosystem health with CiteSpace software, and we believe” The authors must avoid using words indicate their personal opinion.

 In the text, reference numbers should be placed in square brackets [ ], and placed before the punctuation; for example [1], [1–3] or [1,3].

 

 A native spoken English professor must check the manuscript 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The author responded well to my comments on the manuscript.