Analyzing Changes in the Flow Regime of the Yangtze River Using the Eco-Flow Metrics and IHA Metrics

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

I had reviewed a previous submission of this article and I had made a few recommendations to the authors that in my opinion could improve the quality of their manuscript.

I was pleased to see that the authors have made all the recommended changes and they have improved substantially the article.

I only have very few minor remarks that the authors could consider for a 2nd round of minor revision

Abstract:

Lines 9-10: You can merge these two sentences, or you can delete the first sentence.

Line 14: Please rephrase (e.g the results showed that flow regime changed significantly…)

Lines 24-25: Is this a result of your study? If not you should not include it in the abstract.

Introduction:

Line 32: Please also check the article by Stefanidis et al. 2016 in Science of the Total Environment with title “Assessment of the natural flow regime in a Mediterranean river impacted from irrigated agriculture”

Lines 64-79: I recommend to start the introduction with this paragraph highlighting the effects of flow regime change on fish and emphasizing the need for monitoring the hydrologic alteration with the use of indicators.

Methods:

Line 161-192: There is a lot of information in this paragraph that in my opinion should be included in a separate subsection of results

Author Response

Please see the attached file. Thank you!

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

General Overview

Authors of this manuscript have presented a study related to the assessment of the changes in the flow regime of the Yangtze  River using eco-flow metrics and IHA metrics. This study investigates the impact dams in the flow regime alteration. The authors found that Combing eco-flow metrics with IHA metrics may yield an efficient framework that could provide useful measurements of flow regime changes. The topic is interesting, an important issue and generally well written.

The manuscript is technically correct. However, there are still some occasional grammar errors through the manuscript especially the article ‘’the’’ is missing in many places, please make a spellchecking and improve the English. However the manuscript has a clear and state of the art Introduction, the Methodology can be repeatable of other case study and easy to implement. Nevertheless, it will still some clarification. The results and discussion section needs further improvement, compare your findings with the other author's findings. Therefore, the reviewer recommends to further improve the manuscript before accepting it for publication. Please provide more deep discussion about your results. Please clearly state the novelty of this work. Definitely, after the authors make respective correction and improvement, the manuscript deserves to be published in Water journal.

Specific Comments   

Line      106, please explain how the data were selected, based on which criteria?

Figure      2, there is a mistake in the naming the eco-metrics parameter, changes places of the ecodeficit and ecosurpus.

The      equations from line 237-253 are very clear how are obtained and what represents,      please explain explicitly.

Table      5, how it is possible that some figures in the table even they are less      than 0.05 can be considered statistically      significant? Please explain.

The      discussion section is lacking references; please      cite the following references:

Alfredsen, K. (2017). An Assessment of Ice Effects on Indices for Hydrological Alteration in Flow Regimes. Water, 9(12), 914.

Kuriqi, A., Rivaes, R., Sordo-Ward, A., Pinheiro, A. N., & Garrote, L. (2017, April). Comparison and Validation of Hydrological E-Flow Methods through Hydrodynamic Modelling. General Assembly Conference (EGU), Vienna, Austria, (19), 13634.

Pragana, I., Boavida, I., Cortes, R., & Pinheiro, A. (2017). Hydropower Plant Operation Scenarios to Improve Brown Trout Habitat. River Research and Applications, 33(3), 364-376.

Kuriqi A., Pinheiro A., Sordo-Ward A., Garrote L. (2017, July). Trade-off Between Environmental Flow Policy and Run-of-River Hydropower Generation in Mediterranean Climate. 10th World Congress on Water Resources and Environment on Water Resources and Environment "Panta Rhei" (EWRA), Athens, Greece, (60), 123-130.

Please      consider presenting the methodology applied in this work through a flowchart;      it will be much easier to understand from the readers.

In      many places’ articles ‘’the’’, ‘’a’’, ‘’an’’ is missing, please check and      correct.

Please      check the references, some of them are not according to the journal      guideline, especially the abbreviation of the journals name.

Concluding      Remarks

The work presented in this manuscript is an interesting topic, it needs some more efforts to improve it further. Reviewer recommend minor revision of this manuscript and publishing it only after specific improvement of the current version are made.

Author Response

Please see the attached file. Thank you !

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf