Spatiotemporal Evolution of Urban Agglomeration and Its Impact on Landscape Patterns in the Pearl River Delta, China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper entitled “Spatiotemporal evolution of urban agglomeration and its impact on landscape patterns in the Pearl River Delta, China” is about the characterization of the urban area expansion patterns in the Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration in China. The topic is of interest but the paper presents some issue that should be solved before its publication.

GENERAL COMMENTS:

- In the introduction some paper linked to the topic of this research should be referenced to enforce the state of the art. In this direction I would suggest the following articles to be referenced: https://doi.org/10.3390/rs14205255; https://doi.org/10.1002/ldr.4072; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.118836. 

- The adopted method and the used datasets should be better presented to help any potential readers understanding the work done in this study. In particular, it is not clear how and in which environment the seven reproduced maps have been used to the further processes. Please also seriously consider to add a workflow figure showing the different phases of the proposed methodology. Explaining more in details the adopted method is also important to better understand the presented results;

- Conclusions section should be improved with some lines about limitations of the proposed methodology (if there are any) and some idea about further developments.

SPECIFIC COMMENTS:

- Lines 144-147: please add few lines to better present the dataset used in this work;

- Lines 158-160: please add the basic information about the method used to reprocess the maps;

- Line 172: please correct typo;

- Line 173: please add the number of the equation;

- Line 184: please correct typo;

- Line 185: please add the number of the equation;

- Lines 256: in Fig. 5-a the leapfrog expansion is hardly visible. Please try to change the adopted color. Moreover, I suggest adding, in all figures of Fig.5, few zooming plots (3-4) to better highlight the presented urban growth patterns;

- Line 281: please correct typo;

- Lines 299-230: please explain all the acronyms appearing in the figure;

- Lines 314-315: please explain all the acronyms appearing in the figure;

English is quite good. Just some minor edits.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Review: Spatiotemporal evolution of urban agglomeration and its impact on landscape patterns in the Pearl River Delta, China

The paper discusses the spatial and temporal dynamics of urban development in the PRD region and its impact on urban and regional landscapes. The scientific issues are clear, but the research program needs further improvement, and the depth of the analysis of the impact of the evolution of urban agglomeration on landscape patterns is not studied. This weakens the value of the study to some extent. Moreover, the biggest problem with this article is that the article does not fit well with the scope of Remote sensing journal.

All concerns, major and minor, are noted below.

1. Need to add research advances on the impact of urban agglomeration evolution on the landscape in the introduction section?

2. Materials and methods section needs to add the research method of "urban agglomeration impact on landscape".

3. The granularity is an important issue in the study of the landscape level, and the authors do not give any indication about this issue. The authors directly used 30m data for the analysis, so whether this granularity is the best granularity for analyzing the problem of this paper needs to be given quantitative clarification by the authors.

4. In result 3.3, the relationship between urban agglomeration and landscape patterns is described only qualitatively on the basis of the map of landscape index changes, and this analysis is not deep enough. Moreover, how do the authors determine how much the change in landscape index is caused by urban agglomeration and how much its contribution? I hope the authors do an in-depth analysis in this section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, I really appreciated your efforts and your paper is significantly improved in the opinion of this reviewer. Therefore, this paper can be published in its current form.

The English language is quite good.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript has been sufficiently improved to warrant publication in Remote Sensing.