Impacts of Land-Use Types and Landscape Patterns on River Water Quality in the Dry-Hot Valley Basin with Frequent Geological Hazards in the Southwest China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear Authors, I have carefully gone through your manuscript and found it interesting and technically nice. Before the paper is considered for publication, I suggest following improvements and corrections to be made:
- Please add major numerical results to the abstract, currently you highlighted simplified results only. For eg. values of WQI should be explicitly mentioned.
- In introduction, please add some stats about water resources to justify your problem statement.
- For Google earth images in Table 1, please properly attribute the source and copyright as per standard guidelines of Google source.
- In table 2, please add reference of each formula from where you have obtained them (create new column).
- Figure 2 and similar, please justify the meaning on bards, middle point, and data distribution patters briefly in figure caption.
- Table 3, it will be better to add SD or SE to the values and clarify how many replicates were used.
- Figure 6 is not correlation matrix, it is biplot diagram of multivariate analysis.
- Remove patents section as it has no information.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe following points are to be addressed:
The criteria behind the selection of the monitoring network, as well as rainfall-event sampling, should be included in the methodology section.
The p-values, confidence intervals, and effect sizes are not consistently reported, which weakens the statistical analysis. The details will improve the credibility of the results.
The application of multivariate hypothesis testing or mixed-effects models could have supported the causal effects on flow and landuse interactions. The reason for not selecting these methods should be included in the discussion.
Include biogeochemical processes like oxygen consumption, microbial activity, etc., as they have to be discussed in connection with physical transport mechanisms. This will support the DO consumption and nutrient dynamics.
Unit formatting, indicator names and abbreviations should be standardized throughout the article.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageUnit formatting, indicator names and abbreviations should be standardized throughout the article.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors(1) The water quality data during flood season and non-flood season are the same between lines 270-288. Please confirm if there are any errors and if they do not correspond to the content in Figure 2.
(2) When analyzing the water quality of tributaries, the specific situation of the tributaries should be explained, such as pollution types, sediment conditions, and other information, to avoid analyzing the impact of only land use types on water quality and avoid bias. In addition, the impact of tributaries on the main river channel is explained by factors such as the proportion of tributary flow, in order to demonstrate their contribution to pollution in the main river channel.
(3) Carefully check the correspondence between the text and images, and place the images after the corresponding text. As mentioned in line 419, Figure 5 should be Figure 6.
(4) The clarity of ENVI images in Table 1 is poor. Please explain which analyses this image is used for.
(5) The conductivity index is lower during flood season than during non-flood season. Please explain the reason. In theory, conductivity is the same as pollutants, and the more erosion during the flood season, the higher the conductivity.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe manuscript is devoted to the actual and promising approach combining analysis of landscapes structure from remote sensing data with the results of the river water quality. This study investigated the impact of riparian landscape patterns on river water quality based on the redundancy analysis between different landscape indices and common water quality indicators (TP, TN, NH4, COD). The approach is promising and interesting in general. The specific result: the investigation of the role of the debris flow trace area as sources of water pollution is also valuable and worthy to be published.
The plus of the manuscript is a good coverage of the rivers by the sampling points and reasonable monitoring frequency to study seasonal variability in the region studied (Dec, Jan, Apr – for the dry season, and June, Aug – for the flood season). Authors utilize broadly used software (Fragstats) for the calculation of the well-known landscape indices and it is an advantage as well.
Methods used for the water quality determination are clear, though some clarification is needed for the determination of “sediment transport rate”. Usually filtration through the preweighted 0.45 mkm membrane with further drying and weighting was used for the assessment of suspended solids content in the river waters (mg/L). The authors apparently used evaporation with weighing of the remaining sediment. Please, clarify the method for the determination of the suspended solids content, and “sediment transport rate, kg/sec” broadly used in the discussion in sub-section 4.2. Were water flow rate and sediment transport been measured in the August 2024 before/after rainstorms observation, only, or other samplings are accompanied by water flow rate measurements as well?
It is worthy to take into account that dissolved oxygen (DO) should be discussed as water quality indicator with caution, because DO contents depend on the temperature first. The % of DO saturation could be recommended as water quality indicator at the different temperature of the waters studied.
Some minor comments should be taken into account as well.
L.293 Please, check the sentence “The average water quality index values during the flood and non-flood seasons across different zones” - looks like the verb is absent.
- 360 – Capture to Figure 4 should be rearranged to explain the changes in water quality indicators before and after rainfalls (based on the text from the L. 310-318 mistakenly related in the manuscript to the Figure 3). And the colors of the circles for the water quality indicators before and after rainfalls should be done more contrasted (yellow and opaque green are not distinguishable at the Fig. 4 of the manuscript). Might be yellow and blue or red?
L.363. The Figure 5 not 4 is discussed in the sub-section. Please, check.
L.402, 419 Please, check. Figure 6 should be here, not Figure 5.
- 529 Please, check the number of Figure 6. Looks like should be Figure 7.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
