Assessing the Impact of Land Use Changes on Ecosystem Service Values in Coal Mining Regions Using Google Earth Engine Classification

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Title: Assessing Ecosystem Service Values’ Response to Land Use Changes via GEE Classification in Coal Mining Regions

 

Observations:

1) The introduction was revised.

2) The methodology was better detailed.

3) Suggestion: Table 4 should be added as an appendix (after the references). And the empty column (Remarks) should be removed from Table 7.

4) "3. Research Results and Analysis" should be renamed to "3. Research Results and Discussion". The authors chose to include the discussion throughout the text.

The final items will have their numbering changed:

3.7. Impact of LUCC on ESV

3.8. ESV Implications for the Ecological Impacts of Coal Mining on Overlapping Areas in YME

 

The authors followed the recommendations, assessing their coherence with the work proposal. Acceptance is recommended, with minor revisions not returned to the reviewer.

Author Response

Comment 1：The introduction was revised.

Response 1：Thank you for noting the revision of the introduction. We have restructured this section to improve clarity and alignment with the scope of the study. We believe the revisions have strengthened the theoretical background and contextualization of the study.

Comment 2：The methodology was better detailed.

Response 2：We appreciate your feedback. We have provided more detailed descriptions of the methodology, particularly the data preprocessing and classification steps. The added details should enhance the transparency and replicability of our methods.

Comment 3：Suggestion: Table 4 should be added as an appendix (after the references). And the empty column (Remarks) should be removed from Table 7.

Response 3：We agree with this suggestion. Table 4 has been moved to the appendix section, following the references. Additionally, the empty column in Table 7 (Remarks) has been removed as it did not contribute to the table's content.

Comment 4：

"3. Research Results and Analysis" should be renamed to "3. Research Results and Discussion". The authors chose to include the discussion throughout the text.

The final items will have their numbering changed:

3.7. Impact of LUCC on ESV

3.8. ESV Implications for the Ecological Impacts of Coal Mining on Overlapping Areas in YME

Response 4：We have revised the section title as recommended and renamed it to "3. Research Results and Discussion." We have also integrated the discussion throughout the section, highlighting the analysis and its implications in parallel with the presentation of the results. We have updated the numbering as requested. The sections now follow the new numbering structure.

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

On the whole, this paper is an important guide for exploring coordinated trade-offs between the management of nature reserves and coal mining areas. However, I think that the authors should have the necessary discussion about the typicality of the study area to highlight the typicality of the study and its generalizability so that other authors can refer to it in the future.

There are a few minor points that I would like the authors to address:

1. the way the references are written, such as references 12-21.

2. necessary explanations of formulas and abbreviations in the figures.

3. the specification of the diagrams, which now need to be further optimized.

4. the population surveyed for the 500 questionnaires, whether they are local residents or not, whether they are close stakeholders or not, this needs to be clarified.

5. the relevant recommendations given by the authors in the final section. I suggest the authors to optimize the recommendations with the results of the study.

Author Response

Comment 1：the way the references are written, such as references 12-21.

Response 1：We apologize for the inconsistencies in the reference formatting. We have corrected the reference style to match the journal's guidelines. References 12-21 have been revised, and all citations are now consistently formatted.

Comment 2：necessary explanations of formulas and abbreviations in the figures.

Response 2：Thank you for pointing this out. We have added brief explanations for the formulas used in the methodology section, as well as clarifications of abbreviations in the figure legends. This will help readers understand the key metrics and variables presented in the figures more clearly.

Comment 3：the specification of the diagrams, which now need to be further optimized.

Response 3：We agree with your suggestion. We have improved the resolution and clarity of all diagrams and optimized the visual presentation of key figures. This includes making the text larger for readability and ensuring that the visual elements are aligned for clearer interpretation.

Comment 4：the population surveyed for the 500 questionnaires, whether they are local residents or not, whether they are close stakeholders or not, this needs to be clarified.

Response 4：Thank you for the comment. We have added more detailed information regarding the population surveyed for the 500 questionnaires. The participants were primarily local residents from the overlapping area of the YME Second Mine. They were selected to represent stakeholders directly impacted by mining activities and ecological changes, ensuring that the survey captures relevant perspectives.

Comment 5： the relevant recommendations given by the authors in the final section. I suggest the authors to optimize the recommendations with the results of the study.

Response 5：We appreciate this suggestion. Based on the study’s results, we have refined the recommendations in the final section to align more closely with our findings. Specifically, we now recommend targeted actions for ecological restoration, balancing land use, and sustainable livelihood strategies for local residents, all grounded in the insights provided by the research results.

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This manuscript is methodologically innovative, combining several models and data analysis techniques, but further enhancements in data processing details, method validation and result interpretation are needed to ensure the reliability  of the study.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

 

I appreciate your work and published it in Remote Sensing. 

I attached my comments and reviews.

I hope my review will help your work. 

 

Best regards,

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Dear Authors,

 

The quality of English is also mentioned in my review report. 

Please check my review report.

 

Best regards,

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report (New Reviewer)

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

 

I read your manuscript and give you critical comments below. 

I hope my comments will help you.

Please read it carefully and improve your study. 

 

 

There are 3 big issue on your manuscript.

 

1. possessive case 

• In usually, the possessive case are not used in scientific research paper. However, I found plenty of possesive cases in your manuscript. Also, It can be found in the title. Please modify all of possesive case and make your work better scientific sound.

2. Discussion without reference

• The manuscript write the results and discussion in chapter 3. But I can not find any of reference in the results and discussion. Especially, some of sentences, probably discuss your results, do not have any reference. It is critical to make your results weakness.

3. Order of methods

• By my comments in round 1, the order of methods are changed. However, some of sub-chapters in chapter 2 (Materials and Methods) are not claer. I kindly recoomend you to change the order of chapter 2 below. 
• Sub chapter 2.1. should be located after Data prepartation.
• Sub chapter 2.2. Study area should be located the beginning of chapter 2
• Also, the sentences, line 356 to 361, which represent the Kappa coefficient and other accurate indecies must be belong to materials and methods part with the formula. 

 

Others.

• I appreciate your work for revision. However, the response is unfriendly to read and find what you revised.
• In this round, please highlite the sentence what you change and metion the lines what you revised on the response. 

 

I hope this comment will help you.

 

Best regards,

reviewer

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Dear editor, 

I review all the manuscript in this round and attached my review comments to the authors.

I kindly suggest you to my opinion about this manuscript. 

In my opinion, this manuscript must be improve several times more.

The manuscript must be improve for having scientific sound. Unfortunately the writing techniques about authors are too pool. 

I am worrying that editorial teams in MDPI can handle this problem. 

Please, read this manuscript again and give your valuable opinion to authors too. 

 

I apologize to delay my comments. I hope you my review can help you to make decision.

Best regards,

Wonhee Cho

Author Response

Response to Reviewer Comments
Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your detailed review and constructive suggestions on our manuscript.We have carefully addressed all your comments,and the revisions are outlined below:

1.Possessive Case

• Revisions:All possessive forms('-'s)were removed and replaced with"of"structures or noun premodifiers.For example:

• Original title:"Urbanization's Impact on Ecosystem Services"
• Revised title:"Impact of Urbanization on Ecosystem Services"
• Original sentence:"The model's accuracy was improved"→"Accuracy of the model was improved"
• Specific locations:Lines 82-84,154-157,170-173,

2.Discussion Without Reference

• Revisions:We added4 relevant citations in Chapter 3(Results and Discussion),particularly to support each interpretive statement.For example:

• Lines 558-589:”and the ecosystem’s health underpins ecosystem services[68,69],..."
• Lines 582-583:"Possible explanations include the significant shifts in human land use behavior that occurred before and after these mining activities[70],..."
• Lines 584-585:"along with the inherent natural resilience,which is evident within the boundaries of the protected reserve[71]."
• New references are listed on Page 26.

3.Order of Methods

• Revisions:

• Restructured Chapter 2(Materials and Methods):
  • Original Section 2.1(Study Area)moved to the beginning as new Section 2.1.
  • Original Section 2.2(Data Preparation)retained,with subsequent sections renumbered.
• The Kappa coefficient and accuracy indices(originally Lines 356-361)were moved to Section 4.2.(Classification accuracy validation),and formula derivation was added(Lines 283-310).

Other Revisions

• Response Format:We highlighted all the revised sentences in the revised draft with a yellow underlineand itemized the specific lines in the response letter(as in the example above).
• Language Editing:Professional academic editors from MDPI have been hired to optimize the language of the full text to ensure a more fluent and scientific expression,and the English editorial certificates are listed below.

We believe these revisions have significantly improved the manuscript,and we welcome your further feedback.Thank you again for your expertise!

Best regards

Shi Chen

College of Water Resources and Architectural Engineering

Northwest A&F University

Email:chensun2006@nwafu.edu.cn

Tele:+8613201691957

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

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

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper is a classical review of land use change mapping. Many similar type of work exists based on GEE and a selected number of vegetation indices. The review is strongly biased to Chinese contributions to the international literature. 

While it is mentioned at few places that this paper provides the link between LULC and Ecosystem Services, I did not experience any better understanding of this relationship after reading the manuscript. Biodiversity, environmental pollution, groundwater and moisture impact is not addressed. There is a basic assumption with the authors that every LULC class has certain fixed Ecosystem Services. But what are they, and is it not more interesting to model these processes such as erosion, water storage, impact on downstream water availability etc. ?

In fact, the evaluation is having a strong economic component that is based on agricultural production. Economy and its sensitivity is getting more attention than natural-based solutions.

Without any further description why only LULC information is essential for assessing ecosystem service values, this paper should be rejected. The authors should also elucidate why LULC information is used only, and not other remote sensing modelling related to vegetation health, soil health and water systems.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

General Comments:

This manuscript presents a detailed analysis of how Ecosystem Service Values change in overlapping regions of coal mining and protected areas. The manuscript is well written with suitable methodology and analytical tools. The systematic analysis sections of the article can draw relevant findings. This study has essential implications for understanding the influences of human activities on ESVs. However, there are some suggestions that the authors can improve during the revisions.

Detail Comments:

1. The existing Introduction section is relatively short and needs to be further enriched. The necessity of studies regarding coal mining areas should be further demonstrated. Existing studies should be further summarized in terms of commonalities and differences, and existing research gaps should be presented. research objectives and structural arrangements should be in separate paragraphs.

2. Figure 1: The scale of the different sub-maps should be added. The range of elevation legend should be further refined. The existing legend grading does not reflect the starting and ending values of the elevations and what the different colors represent. For the sub-map in the lower left corner, it is not possible to distinguish which of the green ranges and black ranges corresponds to the coal mining area and which corresponds to the protected area due to the lack of a legend. These should be labeled.

3. The authors should explain in the paper why the coal mining area was chosen as representative of the coal mine ESV study. Also, why the study time period is 2013 to 2021 rather than a longer time frame should have been stated.

4. Figure 2: The font of all text in the flowchart should be consistent.

5. Table 2: Whether there are any errors in the units in the table headings. The coefficients should not have any units.

6. Figure 3: Since the authors used Landsat8 data screened from May through September, only the corresponding year needs to be labeled in each figure. The existing classification has poor color contrast and lack of clarity, and a different ribbon should be considered. Multiple fonts appear in the figure, please adjust them.

7. Figure 4 to 9: Make sure the fonts, font sizes, and text colors in the figures are consistent. Remove the outer border of the figures.

8. What is the difference between Table 3 and Table 6?

9. Figure Legends: Check the category of different land use types and different ESVs. If the words are separated, there should be a blank space between words. Or else, the second word should be lowercase rather than uppercase.

10. Line 382: Please check the symbol “$”.

11. Line 397 and 431: Since the acronym “ESV” has been given earlier, just make sure to use the acronym throughout the text.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Paper: 

Assessing Ecosystem Service Values’ Response to Land Use Changes via GEE Classification in Coal Mining Regions

 

Objective:

This study aims to classify the land use of the overlapping area between Yang Coal No. 2 Mine and the ecological reserve using the GEE cloud platform, to investigate the response of ESV in the overlapping area to the change in land use, and to investigate the impact of coal mining in the mine area on the ecological environment.

 

The relevant aspects:

- The paper presents a contribution to remote sensing evaluation techniques.

 

- The authors used Landsat 8 remote sensing (2013 to 2021) and the Google Earth Engine (GEE) platform to classify land use with a random forest algorithm. The calculated indices were the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), normalized difference built-up index (NDBI), enhanced vegetation index (EVI), and bare soil index (BSI), integrated with topographic features. 

 

- The results highlight the significant impact of LUCC on ESV and underscore the critical role of human activities.

 

The observations are:

- Line 54: 

Authors could present the relationship between the ecosystem service value (ESV) and the application of spectral indices based on the literature. 

 

- Figure 1: 

The correct is to present the figure after the paragraph description.

 

- Line 176: 

Authors could explain their application of spectral indices (NDVI, EVI, BSI, NDBI) to land cover classes and the classification key used.

 

- Line 364: The discussion does not present any relationship with literature about the results and methodology.

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The objective of this study is to explore the land use changes and their impacts on ecosystem service values (ESV) in the overlapping area between Yangquan Coal Mine No. 2 in Shanxi Province and a nature reserve, as well as how these changes are influenced by human activities in the mining area.

1. Neither the introduction nor the study area section explains the reason for selecting the overlapping area between Yangquan Coal Mine No. 2 and the nature reserve as the research site.
2. The last sentence of the introduction section reads: "The purpose of this study is to classify the land use in the overlapping area between Yangquan Coal Mine No. 2 and the ecological reserve using the GEE cloud platform, investigate the response of ESV in the overlapping area to land use changes, and examine the impact of coal mining in the mining area on the ecological environment of the overlapping area. An important finding of this study is that human activities have had a non-negligible impact on the ecological environment of the overlapping area." This sentence does not align with the six examples cited previously and fails to explain the innovation points and the reasons for selecting the methods used.
3. The location map in Figure 1 is not clear or aesthetically pleasing.
4. The GEE classification process is conventional, but the data selection (NDVI images from 5.1 to 9.30) lacks specific reasons and only cites literature. It is recommended to provide analysis, such as using satellite remote sensing or reflectivity of images, to explain why vegetation cover in these months is more sensitive.
5. The technical process under heading 2.3.1 simply lists the operational steps.
6. Relying solely on corn yield and value as the basis for ESV calculation may be too simplistic.
7. Does the ecological contribution rate help identify the main factors driving ESV changes?
8. Neither the research methods nor the research results mention the content related to "the impact of human activities in the mining area". Only the discussion section mentions field visits and interviews with local villagers, without specifying the exact time and the number of interviewees.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

can be improved