Assessment of Grassland Degradation on the Tibetan Plateau Based on Multi-Source Data

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments:

This paper used five data sources, including MCD12Q1, Globeland30, CCI-LC, CNLUCC, CLCD and six vegetation indexes to evaluate the grassland changes and quality in Tibet between 2000 and 2020. The article logic is complete. However, from the method to conclusion, this paper is relatively plain. First of all, the author directly overlays the grassland data from the five data sources, and sets the confidence rate at 80% without verifying and analyzing these data, which may lead to the inaccuracy of the basic data. Secondly, the work of this manuscript appears to be not enough. Only 2000,2010 and 2020 are set as the research time points, and the interval of 10 years is enough to make many changes. Finally, the consistency between the control samples and the identification results was also low. Therefore, the significance of this paper is not obvious, and it is suggested that the author to resubmit your manuscript after supplementing the content.

 

Suggestions：

1、 page 1, line 29. It is suggested to add “city” or “county” to each place name.

2、 page 1, line 33. Add the whole name of “SIF”.

3、 page 1, line 34, lack of a noun between “is” and “looming”.

4、 page 6, line 158-159. “80% confidence (at least three products are grassland at a certain pixel position after the five products are superimposed)”, please give a detailed description.

5、 page 6，line 165-166. What is the conversion of non-grassland to  non-grassland？

6、The language of this paper needs to be improved by a native speaker. There are many grammatical errors.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

 

This is a good paper and I hope it will be published after minor revisions.

 

There is a need for the whole manuscript to be evaluated for improvements in the writing. For example, in Line 41, there needs to be a period after ‘ecosystem’.

 

Line 64: has NPP been defined? I see now that it is defined in Line 138, but should be defined in Line 64

Line 108: small annual differences in what?

Figure 1: It is not a topographic map of TP. It’s a vegetation map of TP and a topographic map of China. The latitudes given on the two maps should not be the same, should they? The China map should have a box showing the location of the area included in the TP map. The caption is incomplete.

Line 146: what is meant by ‘geographic system’?

Line 165: grassland to grassland is not a conversion. Just call it ‘no change’?

Equation 1: the symbol before j>I is not defined.

Line 242 and elsewhere: If your pixel size is 1 km, how can you justify significant digits to 0.01% of a square kilometer?

Figures 2b, 3, 6b, and 7b: explain what the colors represent.

Figures 4 and 5: have you defined what ‘significant’ means? OK, I see it now. You might consider saying in the caption for Figure 4 something like …as defined in Table 4

Line 353: A sentence giving changes in temperature and precipitation would benefit the reader. Are the changes 1%? 10%? 30%?

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 

The paper is interesting but its writing is a bit confusing.

I recommend including a section on the study area in which data on geology, geomorphology, climate, soils and vegetation are included. These data could support the results of the epigraph Grassland degradation análisis

Divide figure 1 into two figures: one the location including some geographical reference: municipalities, rivers, etc. and the other the digital terrain model.

Figure : include   scale and some location point

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have answered all of my questions. I think this manuscript has now reached the standard of publications in Remote sensing.