Land Space Change Process and Its Eco-Environmental Effects in the Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration of China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I have reviewed the manuscript titled " Land space change process and its eco-environmental effects in Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration of China". This manuscript utilized long-term Landsat images (Landuse) and Socio-economic data to map Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration (GPUA) urban ecological growth and land-cover changes in the Guanzhong region for the four years 1990-2020. I do not find it suitable for the Land. I have the following observations on this MS.
1. The MS does not contribute anything new in terms of methodology - a set of well-known methods have been applied to a few known Urban Agglomeration and their Land space transfer matrix. I fail to see any fruitful discussion on the generated datasets. Please re-think the scientific problem to be analyzed and solved. The introduction must be improved and the scientific problem has to be clearly identified and addressed.
2. The authors discuss less about the agglomeration and more emphasize on the transfer matrix. I see little novelty in both scientific findings and methodological improvement. First, the authors should clearly state the scientific significance of mapping urban agglomeration growth and land cover changes in Guanzhong, rather than saying something very broad. Second, the terms of its methods, I have to say the methods applied in this study (i.e., a very simple combination of Landcover + Land space transfer matrix + Eco-environment quality) are quite simple and common.
3. The introduction is weak, and the method section is trivial and vague at places. Discussion is non-existing. Most of the literature cited is about urban growth, however, the studied agglomeration and land transformation!
4. I don't feel qualified to judge the English language and style but the English language needs improvement.
5. Abstracts and Introduction does not give concise information about the objective of this work. Why is it needed, what novel is in this research, which papers concerned these research questions to the Guanzhong Plain, and why not, if any? The reasons to study the chosen area? Why area changes in the Guanzhong Plain region are important (besides urbanization)? Which studies are for this region? Partially, these questions were answered, but in my opinion, it is not enough and quite not efficiently.
6. Data source and processing section is uncompleted. Authors should provide more information about the datasets acquired, software used, and processing methods applied to the data: was there any atmospheric correction carried out to the optical data? which one is the final resolution as the research was conducted with datasets at different spatial resolutions? A reference is needed for the different indices.
Even viewed as a work of RS application, this manuscript is very vague about the methodological details and makes the entire analysis a bit loosely conducted. Some examples here, (1) only a few classes are identified: cropland, water, Urban and rural, industrial and mining, residential land, Woodland, Grassland, Water body and unused land, while I expect a slightly more elaborate land-cover classification scheme (or even more preferably, following USGS land-cover scheme or IGBP scheme); (2) how the training and validation samples were collected is unknown, the author provides reference but it’s not the valid justification because they clipped the area; (3) how the land-cover change detected was performed was confusing to me. Apparently, the author just downloads the data from (https://www.resdc.cn/) and just used it. There no effort has been made by the author to improve the methodology of landcover extraction based on ground truthing points or algorithms.
7. Description of the methodology should be much more concise (lines 153 - 164). Which classes were sorted out? Which quantities (transfer matrix, land-use change parameters?) were chosen to separate these classes from each other? How data were trained and randomly classified? What is "train them from 0-8 as per requirement"? Maybe, the classification technique could be visualized or/and quantified based on any example?
8. For Classification, the Authors should explain more about the ground truth used, algorithm or training/validation examples used.
9. The final clear and concise classification list with class properties should be explained and justify the reason why these classes were chosen e.g., Water, Construction land, Paddy field, Dryland, Woodland, Grassland, Reed flat and Mudflat.
11. What are the accuracy metrics in the case of this manuscript and how it was calculated? How are the errors (i.e., the rest percentage) distributed within different classes? Is it uniform distribution or in some classes' errors higher/lower?
12. Area calculation formula must be clarified and each term explained. Changes in land use could be presented (mapped) in another ways, e.g., as differences for each land-use type.
13. In Discussion, "Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be addressed in the broadest context possible and the limitations of the work highlighted. It is also essential to discuss the strengths and limitations of one’s study. Comments on sources of uncertainty and error are appropriate for most papers. Future research directions may also be highlighted.
Recommendation. To summarize my comments, I would recommend to the Authors rewrite this manuscript taking into account most of the issues including motivation, methods, results analysis and conclusions. After the complete elaboration, the manuscript could be resubmitted in this Journal.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for giving me this opportunity to read the manuscript entitled "Land space change process and its eco-environmental effects in Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration of China". The topic of this manuscript is interesting and would be a good contribution to this field. This manuscript has a high quality of finish with good language, clear logic, and appropriate approaches. I think it could be considered for publication in Land once the following minor issues are addressed.
- Please replace the keywords that already appear in the manuscript's title with close synonyms or other keywords, which will also facilitate your paper to be searched by potential readers.
- Figure 5: I suggest the authors change the visualization in Figure 5. The current map can't give readers valuable information clearly.
- Line 61-62 "… the protection of ecological environment does not encourage urban agglomeration in the period of accelerated urbanization [14,15]." Some newly published papers focusing on this issue could be cited here to support the statement. For example, the paper titled "How does urban expansion impact people's exposure to green environments? A comparative study of 290 Chinese cities."
- A brief discussion should be added regarding the impact of the bias and uncertainty in land-use data on the analysis result.
- Some grammatical errors exist in the manuscript. Therefore, a critical review of the manuscript language will improve readability.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
Title: Land space change process and its eco-environmental effects in Guanzhong Plain Urban Agglomeration of China
The paper touches an important topic for investigation. The research plan is well-presented and aptly placed to suit the research in hand. In the abstract, enough information is presented but the first sentence would need a revisit as there is a typo or grammatical mistake. The abstract directly goes to the findings without giving much information on data (both nature, coverage, time period) and if it is done, it makes things much clear. Introduction is nicely framed and linked however there is a need to remove some redundant information and putting what research gap or research questions have been addressed. The last para of introduction seems to be redundant as similar or relevant information is presented in Methods under Study Area. The methods are sufficiently and clearly presented although. Results are intuitive and interesting but there is hardly any study that is referred to support or contradict the findings although there is the discussion section, however, not much scientific studies there too have been used to support findings.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors propose a study with a spatial analysis of land transformation in a large city of China in the last decades. The study is not particularly novel, but interesting. The MS is of fair quality, the presentation of methods is adequate and the discussion is good. I have only two concerns:
1. the novelty of the study should be better specified
2. There is the need to clarify whether the analytical methods are original or derived from other authors.
Some minor suggestions are reported in the commented MS in attachment.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you very much for revising the manuscript. This improvement will surely attract the reader and will contribute a significant role to the scientific community.
Reviewer 3 Report
Authors have aptly addressed my and other learned reviewers comments and hence I support its publication at this stage.
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors replied to the reviewer comments and now the paper is significantly improved.
