Spatiotemporal Hotspots and Decadal Evolution of Extreme Rainfall-Induced Landslides: Case Studies in Southern Taiwan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

The article requires minor corrections.

There is no map showing the location of Taiwan against the background of adjacent countries together with geographic coordinates.

There is a lack of information on small catchments like A01, A03 etc. How big are these catchments? Why were specific catchments selected for description?

What was the percentage of particular types of landslides in the total number of landslides?

Formatting references does not follow Water.

Author Response

Appreciation for the comments. The manuscript has been revised according to the comments and edited by English Edited company. The detailed reply for the comments is attached. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

My major concern about the manuscripts can be summarized as follows:

• why the analysis is done only until 2015 and not beyond, who says that the recovery stopped in this particular year? Would you have data after 2015? Why not using them?
• the definition of the landslide recovery, re-activation, or of new triggered landslides using a large set of data (landslides from the inventory) is a bit mixing up everything. Let me explain. Using only the landslide area in each year it is not clear if this area means the area of newly triggered landslides in this year, where some of the landslides reactivated and/or prolonged? Unfortunately, there are no data on volumes rather than on area. For watershed management, sediment volumes washed from earthquake- or rainfall-triggered landslides are of paramount importance. Sediment supply from such new sediment sources may increase by a magnitude or more.
• I would prefer if you would discuss landslide activity before an extreme event and after it. The pattern should have changed, the landslide activity increased after 2009 Morakot Typhoon. I witnessed its consequences by myself.
• Can you add something to rather descriptive data analysis?

The English should be definitely checked by a native speaker. I had a hard time fully understand what you wanted to say in some places. Please, give the manuscript to an English native speaker to clarify some strange expressions. Especially the use of singular and plural form for some nouns is rather unclear. Some of the suggestions for changes are to be found in the attached pdf, where also other comments are given.

I am also missing the watershed area in km2 of the two watersheds studied. You are giving results (trends) in km2/year, one should know the absolute size of the two watersheds.

All in all an interesting study, a bit hard to read/follow due to its terminology (upslope, middle slope, downslope slopes....), usage of landslide recovery for landslide activity rather than looking at triggered landslides and analyzing when they stop to be active.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Appreciation for the comments. The manuscript has been revised according to the comments and edited by English Edited company. The detailed reply for the comments is attached. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf