Monitoring Land Use Changes and Their Future Prospects Using GIS and ANN-CA for Perak River Basin, Malaysia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comment:

In principle the objective of the study is interesting and relevant (changes in land use and land cover (LULC) caused by human impact and climate change). The authors used data and images from Landsat satellites of the years 2000, 2010 and 2020 and the software ArcGIS 10.8 to calculate and show the changes in LULC for the Perak River basin in Malaysia. Subsequently they prepared a simulation study up to the year 2050 using a MOLUSCE plugin included in the open source software QGIS (version 2.18.25). The results can provide valuable hints to regional policymakers and authorities for future decisions.

The following issues should be discussed and added:

• Page 8, line 270: The meaning and determination/calculation of the “kappa coefficient” have to be explained.
• Page 8, chapter 2.5.1: The description of the calibration/validation process is hard to understand and should be reworded/explained in more detail.
• Page 10, Equation 3: The equation has to be explained or reworded. Is “x” representing a multiplication sign?
• Page 10, lines 290 – 309: This chapter is hard to understand. The meaning and construction of a confusion matrix and especially the statement/meaning of Table 3 should be explained in more detail.
• Page 15, lines 402 – 410: This chapter is hard to understand. The meaning and construction of the transition matrix and especially the statement/meaning of Table 7 should be explained in more detail (How where the numbers/results in the table calculated? In the first row (“Waterbodies”, 2030) the sum of the numerical values is not 1.0 (also in the row “Dense forests”, 2050).

Furthermore, there are a number of errors that should be corrected. The text contains a number of mistakes and missing blank spaces (e. g. between value and unit). So in the final analysis, the reviewed article seems to be suitable for publication after minor revision. The specific comments are summarized in the attached pdf file “Specific comments_water-1316893”.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Using the MOLUSCE plugin in QGIS, the authors studied LULC changes in the Perak River Basin and conducted future predictions. There are several issues in this manuscript that needs to be addressed. Please refer to the points below.

 

- What is the innovation of this study?

 

- Data for 2000 and 2010 are from Landsat 5, and data for 2020 is from Landsat 8. Is there any data consistency issue due to change of instrument? Please explain.

 

- Please be specific about the change detection method in Section 2.4. Please provide formulas and descriptions of the procedure.

 

- How did you adjust image classification if the accuracy assessment check did not pass? For example, which parameter did you change? How did you change it?

 

- How did you validate future predictions of LULC maps? How do you know if a future prediction is accurate or not since it has not happened yet?

 

- Please improve the English writing of this manuscript.

 

Specific comments:

 

- What does CA (line 14) mean? Please provide full name when it first occurs in abstract

 

- Line 100, 226, there is no need to provide the full name of CA again and again since it was given in line 97.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2, the response to all your comments has been addressed in this attachment, the details (heading, pg#, and line #) of responses to the comments have been correspondingly highlighted in the revised manuscript. please find the attached file. 

thanks.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have adequately addressed my comments.