Coastal Scenic Beauty and Sensitivity at the Balearic Islands, Spain: Implication of Natural and Human Factors

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

see attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

thank you so much for  useful suggestions/observations, we carried out all of them.

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“e.g. cliff height can be absent, present an height between 0 and 30 m, 30-60 m, 60-90m or >90 m” line 296. This does not coincide with what is indicated in table 1.

It has been revised, thanks.

 

“All the above enabled a Scenic Evaluation Decision Value “D” for each site to be obtained” line 228. As you have calculated?”

Yes.

 

“All the above enabled a Scenic Evaluation Decision Value “D” for each site to be obtained. These were categorised into five distinct classes, from Class I, extremely attractive natural sites with very high landscape values and an Evaluation Index ≥ 0.85 to Class V, very unattractive urban sites, with intensive development, a low landscape value and a “D” value below zero. A detailed description can be found in Anfuso et al. [71] that presented ca. 1000 sites around the world.” (lines 229-234). You indicate all the classes with their ranges. Are They in Anfuso et. al ?

Yes. Small modifications have been made in the new version of the manuscript.

 

“4. Discussion” (line 299). Results and discussions?

Yes, thanks!!

 

Suggestion to remove paragraph “4.1 Protected areas in the Balearic Islands: legal framework and planning instruments” in “2. Study Area”

Thank you, it was removed and put before “Results and Discussion”.

 

Table 4. In the red box the results show….

Text before table 4 has been modified.

 

I suggest moving (or deleting or summarizing) the paragraph “4.2.2 Examples of investigated sites” to the beginning of the "results and discussions"

Yes, this part has been removed at the beginning of “Results and Discussion”. Thanks.

 

5. Conclusion. You try to enhance your work, especially the scientific part, otherwise it remains locally confined

Conclusion has been revised, especially the final part.

 

Reference Anfuso et al. 2019 (Examples of Class Divisions…)

Correction made, thanks.

 

Best regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

this valuable study is about the Balearic beach assessment of scenery and sensitivity. The manuscript is well-written and gives a very comprehensive overview of scenery that will be useful both for academic and coastal managers. The strengths of this manuscript are the well-known methodology, the extension of the surveys, and the discussion. Hereafter I report some suggestions about minor shortcomings.

 

Lines 63-65: A major concern regarding scenic assessment is due to the inability of scenic evaluation methodologies to represent people’s perceptions, so a great reliance is placed upon subjective aspects.

This is in effect a significant concern but it is not completely true that scenic evaluations do not represent people’s perceptions (CSES has been developed by a questionnaire survey, so there is an implicit consideration of users’ perceptions). Moreover, two recent studies (sorry Editors for self-citations but this is very pertinent to the authors’ sentence) focused expressively on the relationship between scenic assessment and people's perception. Therefore, scenic methodologies can in some cases represent the users’ typologies, their attitude about a specific scenic class associated with the beach they are frequented, and also the willingness to pay to preserve that scenery.

See, just to complete my affirmation, this study:

Rodella, I., Madau, F. A., & Carboni, D. (2020). The Willingness to Pay for Beach Scenery and its Preservation in Italy. Sustainability, 12(4), 1620. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041604

Line 75: I suggest explaining the main difference of this study to the others because there is a lot of literature about the CSES application. Therefore, I recommend highlighting the literature gaps, the relative research questions, and the aims of your study

 

Lines 185-188: they can be avoided because they do not report additional information

Line 193: just to simplify, is it correct to state that you exclude the remote beaches from your study?

Line 196: and over a 100m range along with the sites? As reported by Pranzini et al., 2019 (Pranzini E., Williams A.T., Rangel-Buitrago N. (2019) Coastal Scenery Assessment: Definitions and Typology. In: Rangel-Buitrago N. (eds) Coastal Scenery. Coastal Research Library, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78878-4_5)

Line 240: Is restaurant a new type of utility? It could be a detail but the presence of restaurants is very often associate with recreative beaches and less with natural/protected ones, so this can affect the classification

Table 2: Macro tidal is correlated to null/very low erodibility and micro-tidal range with very high erodibility index. Is it correct?

Line 299: Results and Discussion?

4.1. Protected areas in the Balearic Islands: legal framework and planning instruments I think this section is more appropriate after the Introduction, so it can better explain the coastal framework than here (with the results)

 

Line 426: sand barrier, Punta Alta, Formentera. From a geomorphological point of view, I think the term sand barrier should be translated into peninsula/spit or barrier island. In this specific case, I suggest “spit”

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

thank you so much for  useful suggestions/observations, we carried out all of them.

Best regards.

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Dear authors,

this valuable study is about the Balearic beach assessment of scenery and sensitivity. The manuscript is well-written and gives a very comprehensive overview of scenery that will be useful both for academic and coastal managers. The strengths of this manuscript are the well-known methodology, the extension of the surveys, and the discussion. Hereafter I report some suggestions about minor shortcomings.

 

Lines 63-65: A major concern regarding scenic assessment is due to the inability of scenic evaluation methodologies to represent people’s perceptions, so a great reliance is placed upon subjective aspects.

This is in effect a significant concern but it is not completely true that scenic evaluations do not represent people’s perceptions (CSES has been developed by a questionnaire survey, so there is an implicit consideration of users’ perceptions). Moreover, two recent studies (sorry Editors for self-citations but this is very pertinent to the authors’ sentence) focused expressively on the relationship between scenic assessment and people's perception. Therefore, scenic methodologies can in some cases represent the users’ typologies, their attitude about a specific scenic class associated with the beach they are frequented, and also the willingness to pay to preserve that scenery.

See, just to complete my affirmation, this study:

Rodella, I., Madau, F. A., & Carboni, D. (2020). The Willingness to Pay for Beach Scenery and its Preservation in Italy. Sustainability, 12(4), 1620. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12041604

Yes, it is true. The original sentence has been modified and suggestion made by revisor added.

Line 75: I suggest explaining the main difference of this study to the others because there is a lot of literature about the CSES application. Therefore, I recommend highlighting the literature gaps, the relative research questions, and the aims of your study

Yes, done!

Lines 185-188: they can be avoided because they do not report additional information

Done, thanks.

Line 193: just to simplify, is it correct to state that you exclude the remote beaches from your study?

No. According to Williams (2011), we consider that a remote beach is a site accessible by a walk of up to 300m+ from the closest car parking (line 392, new version of the manuscript). By other hand, more than 50% of investigated sites were located in remote areas (stated in line 391).

Line 196: and over a 100m range along with the sites? As reported by Pranzini et al., 2019 (Pranzini E., Williams A.T., Rangel-Buitrago N. (2019) Coastal Scenery Assessment: Definitions and Typology. In: Rangel-Buitrago N. (eds) Coastal Scenery. Coastal Research Library, vol 26. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78878-4_5)

Thanks for this interesting remark. Sites were assessed over 400-500 meters sectors to have a complete view of sites’ scenic characteristics. This detail has been added in the new version of the manuscript.

Line 240: Is restaurant a new type of utility? It could be a detail but the presence of restaurants is very often associate with recreative beaches and less with natural/protected ones, so this can affect the classification

“Restaurants” have been changed by “leisure facilities” very often devoted to seasonal use (e.g. beach restaurant, beach kiosk, aid station, etc.).

Table 2: Macro tidal is correlated to null/very low erodibility and micro-tidal range with very high erodibility index. Is it correct?

Yes.

Line 299: Results and Discussion?

Yes, thank you.

4.1. Protected areas in the Balearic Islands: legal framework and planning instruments I think this section is more appropriate after the Introduction, so it can better explain the coastal framework than here (with the results)

A new part has been added for this section. It is now “4. Protected areas in the Balearic Islands: legal framework and planning instruments” and “5. Results and Discussion”.

Line 426: sand barrier, Punta Alta, Formentera. From a geomorphological point of view, I think the term sand barrier should be translated into peninsula/spit or barrier island. In this specific case, I suggest “spit”

Thanks, we changed it by “narrow barrier island”.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 3 Report

Review of Manuscript ID: land -1165832

The reviewed manuscript concerns the analysis of natural and anthropogenic factors types in coastal areas of Balearic Islands for complex evaluation of coastal scenic beauty and sensitivity to natural and human pressure. Authors evaluated 52 beach sites, located in four islands: Ibiza, Formentera, Mallorca and Menorca. The study site is very popular touristic destination, and the complex evaluation, proposed by authors can give important information for two sectors: land management, and tourism.

Authors used Coastal Scenic Evaluation System (CSES), which were previously implemented for evaluation of seashore areas throughout Europe, with further using FLA methodology for more precise assessment. Also other classification tools were used for assessment, taking for consideration natural factors influenced on spatial and temporal beaches changes, as well as anthropogenic factors, connected to tourist traffic and environmental changes, induced by large number of people, visiting the Balearic Islands (increase in built-up areas, sewage production, littering etc.). In my opinion taking into consideration natural and human factors is valuable part of proposed evaluation, because it substantially can help to plan scenarios for minimizing negative impact on valuable parts of landscape.

I think that the reviewed manuscript is interesting, and gives new information, which can be used in spatial and environmental planning, and I recommend it for publication in Land after minor revision.

Minor comments:

1. Fig. 1 caption – the software used for making this figure should be specified

2. Methods section: the software used for analysis should be specified. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer

we added information required in the response letter but not in the text since we guess it is not relevant.

Thank you. Best regards.

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The reviewed manuscript concerns the analysis of natural and anthropogenic factors types in coastal areas of Balearic Islands for complex evaluation of coastal scenic beauty and sensitivity to natural and human pressure. Authors evaluated 52 beach sites, located in four islands: Ibiza, Formentera, Mallorca and Menorca. The study site is very popular touristic destination, and the complex evaluation, proposed by authors can give important information for two sectors: land management, and tourism.

Authors used Coastal Scenic Evaluation System (CSES), which were previously implemented for evaluation of seashore areas throughout Europe, with further using FLA methodology for more precise assessment. Also other classification tools were used for assessment, taking for consideration natural factors influenced on spatial and temporal beaches changes, as well as anthropogenic factors, connected to tourist traffic and environmental changes, induced by large number of people, visiting the Balearic Islands (increase in built-up areas, sewage production, littering etc.). In my opinion taking into consideration natural and human factors is valuable part of proposed evaluation, because it substantially can help to plan scenarios for minimizing negative impact on valuable parts of landscape.

I think that the reviewed manuscript is interesting, and gives new information, which can be used in spatial and environmental planning, and I recommend it for publication in Land after minor revision.

Minor comments:

1. 1 caption – the software used for making this figure should be specified

ArcGIS and Corel DRAW were used to draw this figure but we guess it does not worth the while to mention that in the figure caption or in Method, since are current softwares.

2. Methods section: the software used for analysis should be specified. 

 

Current (e.g. Excel) softwares were used for data elaboration for this reason they were not mentioned in the Method.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Congratulations. Job well done