Evaluation of Ecosystem Services in the Dongting Lake Wetland

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This greatly improved manuscript addresses the many comments and suggestions noted by the Journal's Scientific Reviewers and Journal Editors.  The manuscript describes a comprehensive model for evaluating ecosystem services, especially in areas where shistosomiais is prevalent. 

Author Response

Reviewer: This greatly improved manuscript addresses the many comments and suggestions noted by the Journal's Scientific Reviewers and Journal Editors.  The manuscript describes a comprehensive model for evaluating ecosystem services, especially in areas where shistosomiais is prevalent.

Response: we would like to sincerely thank the reviewer for their time, and many thanks for the positive comments on the revised work.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript mainly discussed the variations of ecosystem services in the Dongting Lake Wetland estimated by the InVEST model. It is an interesting research regarding the effects of different factors on ecosystem service value. However, there was a related paper entitled as “Evaluation on ecosystem service value of Dongting lake wetland and ecological restoration countermeasures” and published in Wetland Science 2007, which was conducted in the same area and not reviewed in this manuscript. The authors shall discuss the difference between this manuscript and that paper. There were a lot of words in red and they shall be written in black. There is no need to describe again the methodology in the conclusion. Part of the conclusion was based on no solid support of the result and the conclusion shall be rewritten in a more compact way. The references shall be carefully checked for the requirements of Water and consistency. There are still some minor revisions needed to be finished before considering the possibility of publication.

Minor comments:

P.1, Line 15: define ArcGIS, when it firstly appear in the main content of the abstract.

P.1, Line 61: define ArcGIS, when it firstly appear in the main content of the manuscript.

P.1 Line 17, 30, P.2, Line 97, 99, 104, 105, 109, 110, P.3, Line 127, P.4, Line 133, 135, 167, P.5, Line 202, 204-205, P.6, Line 209-210, 212, P.8, Line 251-252, 262,  264, P.10, Line 305, P.11, Line 309, 316-317, 322, 324, 326, P.12, Line 329, P.13, Line 362, 365-366, 373-374, 394-395, 397 : ”Schistosomiasis” shall be written in italics.

P.3, Line 129: “3,170 thousand” is an impropriate way to describe the study area and shall be revised.

P.3, Line 137: The blank between “grass” and “lands” shall be deleted.

P.4, Line 148-149, 154, 158: The data sources shall be cited as the references.

P.4, Line 149: There is a missed dot between “…cn/)” and “Kriging”.

P.4, Line 153: define GDEMV2, when it firstly appear in the main content of the manuscript.

P.4, Line 153: There is a missed dot between “GDEMV2” and “Digital”

P.5, Line 178:  The authors shall clearly refer to what Penman-Monteith is.

P.5, Line 183:  USLE shall be a variable in Equation (2), however, in Line 182, it already is the abbreviation of “Universal Soil Loss Equation”. The authors shall well define the potential long-term average annual soil loss.

P.5, Line 197:  The authors shall clearly describe the source of Equation (5).

P.7, Line 231-232, P.9, Line 272-273, P10, Line 301-302, P.12, line 329-330, P.12, Line 341-342:  According to the requirement of Water, please change the typesetting.

P.8, Line 235-236:  It is suggested that the authors shall discuss the variations of soil conservation, which increases from 1,257.23x10^4 t in 2005 to 1,931.06 x10^4 t in 2010, then decreases to 1,257.23x10^4 t. Why there exits such a great variation?

P.8, Line 243:  There shall add a blank between digital number and unit.

P.10, Line 277, 284, 293:  improper numbering of Figure 5 (left), (middle), and (right).

P.11, Line 306, 324:  The effective digit of different data shall be unified.

P.12, Line 332: The authors shall describe the statistic program running for the correlation analysis.

P.13, Line 367-370:  This manuscript offered no supporting data or discussion and the authors were suggested that deeper discussion shall be made.

Figure:

1.     The individual figures in Figure 2-8 shall be numbered.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This is and interesting paper but one of the problems is that you are presenting lots of results and lots of interesting graphs. But the discussion section is very limited and discussion about changes between years 2005, 2010, 2015 are not well discussed and often raising lots of issues that remain un-answered/discussed. For example what caused decrease of snail area from 2005 to 2010 and why increased again from 2010 to 2015? Same issue with schistosomiasis patients - I see lots of changes between years but not much discussion about what is causing these changes in different counties etc. Currently the paper is not in balance and you need to improve the general discussion section. 

Figure 1 - can you also show in larger map where this region is located.

I don't understand why are you using hm2 instead of km2?

Line 225-226 - your are saying that from 2005 to 2015 the water yield increase ~66 * 108 m3 but what cause huge increase from 2005 to 2010 and why it decreased from 2010 to 2015? 

Line 242 - what cause sudden and huge C storage increase from 2010 to 2015?

Table 2 - I would recommend adding content price also in more universal currency like USD or EUR.

Overall this is a promising and interesting paper, however in my mind it does not match with the scope of Water journal. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors have improved the manuscript based on reviewers suggestion and therefore I recommend to accept the paper. 

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

The Investigators creatively used the Arcgis 10.2 and the InVEST analytic models combined with the market value method and shadow engineering analysis to conduct a multi-disciplinary analysis of the economic and social impact of Dongting Lake engineering projects on: 1) the local economy, 2) the control of snail vector populations, and 3) the effects of these ecosystmen interventions on the incidence of schistosomiasis among Dongting Lake residents. 

The Group's multi-disciplinary evaluation concluded that the Lake engineering projects contributed substantially to ecosystem and economic stability in the community and the prevention of schistosomiasis among residents in the Dongting Lake region.

To prepare for publication, the manuscript needs extensive editing of English language and style for publication in the Journal. The points described in lines 44 to 84 of the manuscript could be summarized in few sentences.  The Appendix replicates Tables and Figures in main text and could be eliminated. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors present a cost assessment of medical and environmental intervention to control schistosomiasis in a China province

While in principle this information could be interesting, this manuscript has serious flaws both as far as content and its packaging, i.e., its presentation.

The most important pitfall is that the nature of the intervention – the most valuable information of all - is not presented at all, authors make reference to a mysterious schistosomiasis prevention forest but it is not explained what this is about, on which rationale it was conceived and how it was implemented.

Second, I understand that the authors compute the cost of drug administration before the intervention with the jointly cost of the environmental intervention plus drug administration for a smaller population of infected people. Yet, the analysis would be more compelling if the authors had included in the analysis also control sites, i.e., sites where during the same time period no intervention  - aside from drug administration – was implemented so that to assess whether the reduction in the number of schistosomaisis cases was part of a general trend or, conversely, as the authors seem to imply, can be attributed with reasonable confidence to the (otherwise mysterious) schistosomaisis prevention forest.  If this is not possible, then it is impossible to state whether the prevention forest was indeed effective.

Information on the source of the epidemiological data is lacking )who gathered, where when, under what plan, etc.?

Equations 1-3, seems over-simplistic and it is not even clear what INVest has to do with it, you can do this computation probably with any simple GIS software or just by reporting the areas and number of people infected before and after the intervention. So, it should be clearly stated the workflow, for instance: through GIS analysis we gathered information on how much suitable habitat for snails has been claimed. Invest has then been used to compute water yield (which, by the way, has not been defined, nor it has been defined its role for snails and schistosomiasis transmission).

Then, we can to manuscript presentation. The introduction on wetland function is too long and it is not clear what is the connection with the schistosomaisis protection forest, as forests are obviously not wetlands.

The obligate intermediate snail host is mentioned before its role in schistosomiasis transmission is explained. Neither snail genus nor schistsoma species are mentioned in the introduction.

English requires proofing by both scientific and language experts. It is not clear what “landform” and “heat resources” are, what it is meant for “ the terrain is low” and so on and so for.

I have uploaded a version with annotation and comments about the introduction and methods, but then I stopped.

Maybe I am completely wrong, but the overall ms seems almost a transcript from a conference presentation, possibly performed in a context in which a lot of this information was already clear for the audience. Whatever, the authors should put some serious effort to explain the nature of intervention, restructure the ms and polish the presentation. 

With all these flaws I am left with np option than suggestion rejection, I apologies for the authors for not been able to provide a more positive review.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Evaluation of snail control and schistosomiasis prevention forest ecosystems service on InVEST in Dongting Lake.

This manuscript describes the need to better understand wetlands use and services throughout a 10 year period. They describe using different methods to assess the impacts of different land use around the Dongting lake and implications for schistosomiasis within the human population and snail control by environmental change.  

General comments would be to check the English thoroughly – it is generally alright but some confusion in places (a few examples in specific comments below). Additionally, some clarification or further explanation of terms is required (for non-experts). 

Specific comments

Title – fine but not sure if snail control and schistosomiasis prevention is the thrust of the study?

Please explain what schistosomiasis prevention forest is?

Abstract- slightly confusing

L19-23 – reword and break up the sentence 

L26 – reword ‘schistosomiasis patients were reduced’ ? I am assuming the number of patients decreased?

L27 – ‘highest’ – do you mean decreased the most?

Overall not quite sure what the results are telling us about schistosomiasis and water use etc in this area.

Introduction

Describe more clearly what you are doing and what you see as the actual flaws in previous studies.

L57 Great Lakes – do you mean USA?

L60 EPF – what does that mean?

L73 explain why they are not scientific

L78 which study?

L80 – 83 – sentence repeated

L84 – is Dongting lake the national famous schistosomiasis epidemic area? Is it not just somewhere where schistosomiasis occurs?

L85 – ‘The Yangtze is the longest river ‘—be specific the Nile and Amazon are longer…

L87 – what are heat resources?

L91 – ‘lethal conditions of snail’ – doesn’t make sense 

L92 – ‘It plays an important role’ – what does?

Methods

How are you assessing the areas? The formula shown is just a subtraction as far as I can tell from figures from 2015 from those of 2010?

Currently from these methods it is not really clear what the InVEST model is and how you are calculating things? 

Results

Figure not that clear on what you are trying to show – could they be combined in some way instead so you can clearly see distribution changes across what you are measuring and then pull out any critical information/results? 

L247 – there is a figure of how many cases of schisto have reduced by – but what was the starting figure? 

Discussion 

Needs more actual discussion into your results.