A Systematic Review on Advancements in Remote Sensing for Assessing and Monitoring Land Use and Land Cover Changes Impacts on Surface Water Resources in Semi-Arid Tropical Environments

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

The authors have responded satisfactorily to the issues raised in my review report

Author Response

Thank you very much for your inputs

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

This study conducted a systematic review on advancements in remote sensing for assessing and monitoring LULC changes and their impacts on water quality and quantity. The study has a lot of contents, but the focus is not prominent.

Major issues:

1. It is suggested that the contents about assessing and monitoring LULC should be deleted. One reason is that the content about LULC is very broad, and another reason is that the contents about the LULC review in this study are not systematic. The authors should focus on  the review about LULC impacts on water quality and quantity in semi-arid tropical environments.

2. The title is about LULC impacts on water resources in Semi-arid tropical environments, but the abstract and the main body are about LULC impacts on water quality and quantity in semi-arid tropical environments. There is a mismatch between the title and text.

3. The instruction should be rewritten. The first two paragraphs in the instruction are too prolix, and the instruction should come to the point quickly.

4. The research method is simple. The terms for literature search may be optimized.

5. Sections 3.3 and 3.5 should be put together and rearranged. The contents in Section 4.1 are unfocused. The contents about GEE are important data sources. Why are the GEE contents firstly mentioned in the discussion section?

6. Section 5: The conclusion about “most studies have primarily relied on multispectral Landsat images” is one-sided. It seems that authors have not read a lot of literature, but this study is a systematic review.

Minor issues：

1.Figure 1 is blurry, and may be replaced by text.

2. Table 1 only lists the algorithms for LULC classification, and may summarize and categorize the algorithms.

3. Figure 3, the meaning of the oblique line should be indicated by legend.

Author Response

Please see the attachment 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

This paper reviews the progress of land use/cover change and its impact on water resources in semi-arid areas. The summary of remote sensing platform, data and model is comprehensive, which provides basis for the research and management of semi-arid region. The full study was carried out on the basis of systematic literature collection, but the impact of LULC on water resources, that is, the mutual relationship between the two, is a complex issue, which is not clearly explained in this paper, and the description of LULC remote sensing is not deep enough, especially the change detection is not involved, which is the key of LULC remote sensing. It is suggested to focus on clear problems and make a systematic review.

There are also some grammatical problems as partly listed below:

Line 75, ‘surface runoff, streamflow [15]’,add ‘and’ before ‘streamflow’.

Line 82, ‘the change in LULC of the Dal The degradation of the lake’, need to reword.

Line 84-85,’land use and land cover (LULC)’,explain LULC when first time exists.

Line 89-91,change ’Thereby including …tropical environment water resources could potentially alleviate water scarcity, pollution, and conserve water quality’ to ‘Thereby including …tropical environment, water resources could potentially alleviate water scarcity and pollution, and conserve water quality’.

Line 91-93,’Earth observation techniques have been proven to characterize LULC accurately and efficiently and different attributes of surface water resources’, need to reword.

Line165  delete’ sensors’.

Line 166-168 need to reword

Need to improve.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

This study aims to provide a comprehensive systematic overview of the progress, challenges, and opportunities associated with the use of remote sensing applications for assessing and monitoring land use and land cover changes and their impacts on water quality and quantity in semi-arid tropical environments.

Overall, the manuscript is well written. There is a lot of information, however, the structure of the manuscript is not very clear and the information is not well organized. For example, where is the component of water quantity? It would be better if you could organize it as research-question oriented.

Lines 145-161: Did you try to select your target articles by using number of citations? In this way, you may find some articles with wide impacts.

 

Lines 292-299: What about Sentinel-1, Sentinel-2 sensors? They are very popular in recent years. Did you include any studies using them? If not, you may need to check your methods of article selections.

 

Line 434-436: The measurements of water quality in streams are easy. However, the estimation of water quality of streams using remote sensing observations need to be careful about the spatial resolution of the remote sensing data. If the streams are narrow, e.g. <50m. Observations from Landsat could be problematic because of the potential geospatial shifting in Landsat pixels.

 

The quality of the figures is very low. Try to insert clear figures.

 

Section 3.5.2 You mention water quantity in the section title. However, I did not find enough descriptions of water quantity in the section and other sections. If you don’t cover water quantity and only focus on water quality, that’s fine. But, be specific about it.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 5 Report (New Reviewer)

This paper reviewed the advances in LULC mapping using remote sensing techniques as well as their applications in water resource assessment in semi-arid areas. I am interested in how remote sensing has been applied in mapping LULC and assessing water resources. However, it was a little struggle to read this review through though, because the content often consists of many grammar errors. I strongly recommend further English polishing to make the manuscript smoother. Also, it is unclear that what are the most impressive and concrete conclusions from this review, though authors have mentioned different aspects in the main body regarding remote sensing and semi-arid water sources. The abstract and conclusions could be substantially improved to make consistent and clear conclusions.

The following comments are only some examples of clunky sentences from the front part of the manuscript, because there are no line numbers in the manuscript.

Section 2:

“And further outline challenges and opportunities in 133 using remote sensing technology in mapping and monitoring LULC changes and their 134 impacts on surface water resources.”—an incomplete sentence.

Section 3.1:

“The MLC technique also produces lower results when compared to other classification techniques such as ANN, SVM, and RF [”—what is “lower results”?

“The drawback of utilising these algorithms is due to requirement of huge data for training and it is expensive computing for training and testing, RNN on temporal dependency is difficult to learn”. choppy sentence.

Sectioni 3.2:

“Based on Dwa-235 rakish and Ganasri factors such as slope, distance from the river, soil erosion, and  altitude and built-up are also the major drivers of LULC changes.’

English polishing is suggested .

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Authors have answered my questions in the last review . However, They may check the article repeatedly. There are two 3.4 sections in the current version of the article.

Author Response

COMMENT :

Authors have answered my questions in the last review. However, they may check the article repeatedly. There are two 3.4 sections in the current version of the article.

RESPONSE

Thank you for your feedback, and we apologize for the oversight in the current version of the article. We appreciate your diligence in pointing out the duplicate section (two 3.4 sections), and we have addressed this issue accordingly. We have carefully reviewed the article to rectify the duplication and ensure the proper organization of the content. We have thoroughly checked the article to eliminate any further errors or inconsistencies. For detail see Page 12, line 436.

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

This study conducted a systematic review to assess and monitor the progress of remote sensing applications in mapping land use and land cover (LULC) changes and their impacts on surface water quality and quantity, and addressed research gaps, challenges, and opportunities associated with the use of remotely sensed data in assessment and monitoring.

There have been significant improvements compared to the last version. Please note the following details for revision:

 

1)P39-128,In the Introduction Section, the research significance section appears lengthy and repetitive, and it is recommended to simplify it.

2)P178-193, added literature.

3) P223, reference [20] placed before the period.

4) P274-281, Classification using different spectral indices in remote sensing, literature on index classification needs to be supplemented. What are the differences between index based classification and original band based classification results? and why?

5) P289-294, Regarding change detection is too simplistic. Data, technology, and result accuracy need to be introduced

6) P295,Remove the period after ‘Data Initiatives’.

7) P347-348, ‘Whereas water quality pH, TSS, temperature, and DO are mostly assessed in water quality[70]’.need to reword.

8)P352-354,’Based on Dwarakish and Ganasri [43] factors such as slope, distance from the river, soil erosion, altitude and built-up they are major contributing factors of LULC changes’. need to reword.

9)P356, ‘These changes alter the landscape patterns’, What changes?

10) P442-445 , The abbreviations with the first letters such as TP and TN need to be given in full when first exist.

11)P616 , ‘in semi-arid has focused on’, add ’area’ after ‘semi-arid’.

12) P890 , change ‘semiarid’ to ’semi-arid’.

 

 

Moderate.Need to reword somewhere.

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

good revision.

Author Response

Comments and Suggestions for Authors:  Good revision.

 

RESPONSE

Thank you for your positive feedback on the revision. We are glad to hear that you found the changes satisfactory. We appreciate your valuable comments and suggestions, and we're pleased to know that the improvements have met your expectations.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

(1) From the title of the paper, the author's work should be divided into two parts: 1) Summarize and analyze the progress in remote sensing of land use and land cover changes; 2) The land use and land cover changes impacts on water resources assessment and monitoring in semi-arid tropical environments. However, the actual work of the authors focuses more on the impact of LULC on water resources, and the progress in remote sensing of LULC is not summarized and analyzed.

(2) The summary of available advanced algorithms for LULC classification in Table 1 is not enough, and many existing deep learning methods based on RNN and CNN are not mentioned.

(3) Data cleaning and data analysis should be added to research method and literature search.

(4) The summary of available sensors in Table 2 is insufficient.

(5) Remote sensing of LULC is not sufficiently focused on water resource assessment and monitoring in semi-arid tropical environments.

Reviewer 2 Report

I was looking forward to reviewing this manuscript. The topic is interesting and important, and certainly worthy of consideration by Remote Sensing. However, I unfortunately must report that this work is not publishable in Remote Sensing in current form. It is possible that it might become publishable eventually, but this would require so much work that I recommend it be rejected at this time.

 

The main issues I found with the manuscript were:

 

1. English language issues – critical for a review paper.

 

2. Heavy focus on Africa, which is understandable given the institutions at which the authors are located, but needs to be stated upfront in the title.

 

3. Methodology not clear. How did the authors go from 17,500 potential papers to 175??

 

4. There is only one figure, and it is not meaningful. Is the goal just to show that number of publications have increased over time? This is certainly not unique to remote sensing of water resources. What does the R2 value signify? Are 4 decimal places really appropriate?

Reviewer 3 Report

Please see attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf