Exploring the Potential of Soil Salinity Assessment through Remote Sensing and GIS: Case Study in the Coastal Rural Areas of Bangladesh
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Line 17: are utilized, not “is”
Line 51: repetitive “infrastructure” in the text, remove one.
I suggest you add in the first column heading of the Table 1 “Total area affected by soil salinity”. Besides, I think that it is unnecessary to provide the same information in the Table 2 (it completely repeats the Table 1). Leave just two columns in the Table 2 – “Increment of soil salinity affected area be-tween 2000” and 2009, and “Increment of soil salinity affected area be-tween 1973 and 2009”.
Line 108: “interfere with plant feeding” - It would be better to say that “it is an impediment for normal nutrition uptake by plants from the soil”.
Line 104-137: You provide too much information on soil salinity effects on the plant’s cultivation, although this is not the topic of your study. I suggest you cut this part of your manuscript shorter, mainly giving general information on this regard without too many details.
Line 196: “is involved” instead of “involves”
Lines 239-240: You provide somewhat incorrect determination of what NDVI is. Please, give better explanation about this index with a quotation. Keep in mind that NDVI measures not only quantity, but also a quality of vegetation cover.
Line 451: “minimal relationship” – I see that at such values of R2 there is no statistically proven connection between the studied parameters, so the models prove that real in-field measurements are in the absolute contradiction with the spatially derived ones.
Lines 484-485, Table 6: I found no scientific substantiation for this scale in your study. The Figures provided in the study without proper superposition and comparison between the salinity levels and NDVI values are not informative enough.
Lines 489-494, Table 7: It is not clear what for you provided the data about Turkey. Besides, the data are without a quotation.
The study in general is interesting but inconclusive (at least in its present form). The Conclusions contain no essential information on the study results and briefly repeat the information provided in different sections of the manuscript. This section must be rewritten.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer;
Thank you very much for taking the time to revise our paper. Please find the responses in the attachment.
Sincerely;
The authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper needs some corrections on the text (indicated below) and some work on the tables and figures, but more importantly I think authors should also apply some other non-linear (e.g. support vector or k Nearest Neighbors) regression technique to justify the conclusions.
(54-55) Recent studies show that by 2050, climate change will significantly alter river salinity in Bangladesh's southwest coastal region[cite?] .
(60) and poverty reduction in nations with susceptible coastal regions [12] (Brecht et al. 2012).
(70) Different levels of soil salinity already affect about 37% of the cultivable coastal land. [cite??].
(71-72) SRDI (2010) reported that Around 1.056 million hectares of arable land are affected by varying degrees of salinity out of 2.86 million hectares of coastal and off-shore lands.
The Soil Resource Development Institute (SRDI), Ministry of Agriculture, reported that around 1.056 million hectares of arable land are affected by varying degrees of salinity out of 2.86 million hectares of coastal and off-shore lands [22].
(87-88) ..., approximately 35,440 hectares of new land had been affected by varying degrees of 87 salinity [22] (SRDI, 2010).
(90) Table 1 Soil salinity affected area in the coastal region between 1973 and 2009 [22] (SRDI, 2010)
(94) Table-2 A comparative assessment of the salt-affected area from 1973 to 2009 [22] (SRDI, 2010)
(98) According to [22] SRDI (2010), the leading causes of increased ...
(111) [23] Munns et al. (2002) also observed that the osmotic effect because of soil salinity...
(118) plant, and [26] Munns et al. (1995) devised a two-stage model to demonstrate ...
(122) s. [27] Flexas et al. (2007) observed that salinity ...
(127) According to [31] Paranychianakis and Chartzoulakis (2005), salt accumulation in the ...
(131) [32] Taiz and Zeiger (2002) found that the accumulation of ions can prevent ...
(153) Ghabour & Daels [34] observed that Soil salinity determination has traditionally taken time, but remote sensing ...
In the text you says ... Ministry of Agriculture, Bangladesh as a printed map [Figure-2 (a)] 287 showing 85 locations of the soil sampling point. These...
and :
This printed map is scanned, followed by digitization. Next, the dig-292 itized map is georeferenced with WGS 1984 UTM 46 N, and finally, a point shapefile is 293 produced [Figure- 2 (b)].
The caption of the figure 2 says Figure 2: Flow chart for developing Land Use Land Cover Map
figure 3 is not cited in the text.
Figure 6: Salinity maps should be the same size.
(477) Furthermore, in a study carried out by [70] (Gorji et al., 2017) in Tuz Lake Region in Turkey,
(469) The best result found for SI 1 =√B1∗B3 With a R2 value of 0.83. So compared to these studies, the R2 value is very minimum for this study
(486)...minimum value. As a result, Iit is assumed that these salinity indices do not
(491) the Tuz Lake area in Turkey. (an extra space betwen tuz and lake)
Author Response
Dear Reviewer;
Thank you very much for taking the time to revise our paper. Please find the responses in the attachment.
Sincerely;
The authors
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Review: Addressing Climate Change in Coastal Rural Areas: Assessment of Soil Salinity through Remote Sensing in Bangladesh
Manuscript Number: land-1928946
In my opinion, the paper is a good quality work. However, although the reviewer basically judges the paper to be a significant some changes are suggested, in order to improve the overall quality of the paper. Therefore, the Authors are asked to consider the following comments and to add the suggested modifications.
1. You refer to the map Soil Resource Development Institute (SRDI), Ministry of Agriculture, Bangladesh. There is no description here of how the measurements were made and with what instruments?
2. Please standardize the descriptions under the figures one time there is Figure-1 L202 another time Figure 2: L236?
3. Please standardize the table descriptions once it is Table 1 L90 another time Table-2 L 94.
4. Please place captions on the same page as the drawing, eg L 339, L 371.
5. The data in table 1 are merging.
Alongside with the above major points, some minor comments follow.
L 50 remove the space after [15-?
L 60, L122, L 153 are you either quoting [] or giving the names of the authors?
L 287 should be Figure 3 a?
L 294 should be Figure 3 b?
L 480 remove the dot in front of Table 6?
I hope the following comments are informative for the authors when improving the manuscript further.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer;
Thank you very much for taking the time to revise our paper. Please find the responses in the attachment.
Sincerely;
The authors
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The table 6 is still debatable.
Why, for example, NDVI range 0.26-0.40 corresponds to severe salinization? How did you interpolate the value of the index to soil salinity degree?
I think that such a gradation is possible to be created in case of a special research conduction, involving sowing a single chosen crop or grass on the land with previously established salinity expressed in EC or other units, and further NDVI records for this crop on each field. In this case, it is possible to obtain concrete correspondence between average NDVI in the field and average salinity.
In case of the study presented in the paper, I feel that this scale is a rough assumption and lacks scientific evidence.
In general, the paper is good.
I will not accept or decline this paper by myself, and the right of making decision on its publication is up to the editorial board.
Author Response
Thank you very for taking the time to revise again our manuscript. Please find the response to your comments in the attached file.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have corrected it according to my comments. I recommend the acceptance of the work.
Author Response
Thank you very for taking the time to revise again our manuscript. Please find the response to your comments in the attached file.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
