Interconnectedness of Ecosystem Services Potential with Land Use/Land Cover Change Dynamics in Western Uganda

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

General Comments

Dear authors, I hope that you are doing well. Thanks for giving me the chance to review your manuscript “Ecosystem services potential interconnectedness with land use/land cover dynamics in western Uganda”.

The authors map the evolution of land use/land cover change and how it shapes current and future ecosystem services supply potential using community perception and a CA-Markovian prediction model in the Budongo–Bugoma landscape.

Methods

This section needs to be reorganized.

Concretely, in subsections 2.3. and 2.4:

-      In the 2.3. subsection, it is not clear how authors obtain the final ES Matrix. They applied 40 interviews and eight focus groups, and did they get 40 matrices from the interviews? Did they obtain eight matrices from the focus group? If so, how did they get a unique final matrix (shown in table 4)? Also, they mention that they used these two techniques to collect data on LULC and its drivers, but later they used a household survey to manage this data. It isn't apparent to follow.

-      I encourage the authors to rewrite these two subsections according to the methodological process developed: 2.3. Ecosystem services matrix; 2.4. Importance of ecosystem services; 2.5. Perceived drivers of LULCC.

-      Moreover, the authors include Figure 2 but forgot to mention it in the body text.

Subsection 2.5.1. Descriptive statistical analysis, which computer program do you use?

Subsection 2.5.2. PCA, which computer program do you use?

Subsection 2.5.3. Kappa, which computer program do you use?

Subsection 2.5.4. The authors used the same equation for each category of ES, and it is redundant to write three times the same equation for a similar procedure, rewrite this subsection and leave only one formula describing the calculation done for the ES.

Subsection 2.5.5. Correlation analysis, Pearson or Spearman? Computer program?

Results

Figure 3 is missing

Table 1 must go as Supplementary data

Figure 5 and Figure 6 are low-quality excel graphs. I suggest improving them with a design program or using R to draw optimum charts.

Table 2 is missing

There are two Table 3

Table 6 indicates that “The whole pairwise correlation matrix is in the appendix.” This data is missing. Also, in this table, authors display the pairwise correlation between food crops and the other ES, but they forgot to mention for which year corresponds that correlation: 1990? 2000? 2010? 2020?

Discussion

This section needs to include subsections to understand better what the authors want to communicate.

Also, as an additional subsection (preferably at the end of this section), authors must include a subsection on the study's methodological limitations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Dear Editor, I congratulate the authors for carrying out and designing an excellent draft. The manuscript is drafted in a very coherent manner and fits well in the scope of the journal and novel to the audience.

Although, I will suggest the authors critically look at the abbreviation and reference portion besides English checking and other grammatical errors etc.

Author Response

Please see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript ID (old): land-1782614

Manuscript ID (New): land-1907976

Manuscript "Spatio-temporal land use/land cover change affects ecosystem team services potential in western Uganda."

****Please carefully check the attached file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Review of manuscript "Spatio-temporal land use/land cover change affects ecosystem services potential in western Uganda" (land-1907976)

Dear authors, your research tries to simulate and predict the future land use and land cover changes and ecosystem services potential in 2040 in mid-western Uganda by using the Dinamica-EGO model. It is an easy-to-follow manuscript and fits the aims and scope of the journal topic. Nevertheless, the authors need to highlight the novelty of their research building upon previous research. Therefore, "Major Revision" is required to largely improve this manuscript. Specifically, the reviewer has the following comments and suggestions:

(1) The Introduction Section: this part is very weak because the authors did not highlight the purpose and novelty of this study from an international perspective. As a consequence, reviewers cannot figure out why this research must be performed in this context. If this research just presented a case study with common methodology in mid-western Uganda, then it lacks novelty for publishing in the internationally-distinguished journal. I would like to remind that the Dinamica-EGO model is not a new method.

(2) The literature review paragraph: in this part, the authors must look further into the latest research about land use and land cover simulation models. In particular, the well-known FLUS, SLEUTH, and CLUMondo models have been extensively adopted by numerous up-to-date studies (please find below for discussion). Why not use these well-accepted models? A thorough literature review is meant to set the context for your research work and highlight how it contributes to the knowledge in this field and builds on previous relevant research.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.04.007

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2022.103812

https://doi.org/10.5220/0006381203190326

(3) Section 2.2 Satellite imagery and processing: in this part, the ten-year time step is too long that the specific details on land use and land cover changes may be missed during the calibration of the cellular automata model.

(4) Line 132-139: in this part, I really doubt that whether the Landsat imageries with a 30 meter of spatial resolution are able to distinguish the differences between commercial farming and subsistence farming, forest, bushland, grassland, and woodland. In addition, how to obtain the final classification accuracies? e.g., which datasets have been used as the validation baseline?

(5) Section 2.3. Prediction of land use land cover change: in this part, the authors did not describe all the acquiring dates of the driving variables. 2010, 2020, or any other years? Which year(s) is used for predicting to 2040?

(6) Figure 2: this flowchart can be reorganized into a more hierarchical structure.

(7) Line 225-256: in this part, how to determine the coefficients for different ecosystem services? Did they remain all the same from 1990 to 2040?

(8) Section 3.2. Predicted Land Use/Land Cover in 2040: in this part, the validation of the land use and land cover simulation result is missing. In other words, the simulation result from 2010 to 2020 should be compared with the observed land use data in 2020.

(9) Figure 4: I suggest the authors to overlay these two different maps so that the differences between them can be revealed more clearly.

(10) The citation format in the main text is incorrect.