Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper is considerably improved over what was submitted previously. I think there is a related study in Cities by Yang et al (2021) that you should cite:

Quantifying spatiotemporal patterns of shrinking cities in urbanizing China: A novel approach based on time-series nighttime light data

I also think the reference numbering is misaligned (e.g. in text reference 50 refers to issues with population data in yearbooks versus the census, but the study in the reference list that covers this is #51. So a tidying up is needed.

Author Response

Thanks for your valuable suggestions and comments. We have added the study you recommended into the reference and we also revised the reference list. The specific changes were highlighted in the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

This study proposed a novel method to identify and classify shrinking cities by combining long-term time series of  night-time light data with auxiliary data.The revised version solved my questions, and I recommend it be accepted.

Author Response

Thanks for your kind evaluation and helpful comments！