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Review
Peer-Review Record

Land Consumption Classification Using Sentinel 1 Data: A Systematic Review

by Sara Mastrorosa 1,*, Mattia Crespi 1,2, Luca Congedo 3 and Michele Munafò 3
Reviewer 1: Anonymous
Reviewer 2:
Reviewer 3:
Submission received: 2 March 2023 / Revised: 13 April 2023 / Accepted: 14 April 2023 / Published: 21 April 2023
(This article belongs to the Section Land – Observation and Monitoring)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The paper has improved since its withdrawal. However, some formatting issues need to be addressed.

Suggestion 1: Kindly ensure that the table lines are all black.

Suggestion 2: Ensure that all figures' texts follow the same font style used for the primary texts.

Suggestion 3: Kindly avoid providing citations in the conclusion section.

Suggestion 4: Ensure to follow the format of listing papers in the reference section.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

This manuscript presents a systematic review of “Land consumption classification using Sentinel 1 data: A systematic review”.

I acknowledge that the authors have gone to great lengths to address the issues that I have raised in my first report. Most of my concerns have been addressed satisfactorily. I appreciate the authors for their hard work. However, there are some minor aspects of the manuscript that I believe should be addressed by the authors before publication.  

1.     Please check and revise this sentence, “The Copernicus Programme by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Union (EU), by launching the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Sentinel-1 and the multispectral Sentinel-2 satellites, has provided a valid contribute to monitor the Earth’s surface.”

2.     Some of the paragraphs are too short, I suggest to merge it with other paragraphs. For example the first paragraph is just a single sentence.

3.     Please check the citations and revised it. For example citations are currently written as [1], [2] that may be revised as [1,2]. Similarly [1], [2], [3] as [1-3].

4.     Please check this sentence for any error, “At European level, this phenomenon is an important issue, which has prompted the European Commission to publish best practice guidelines to limit, mitigate, or compensate soil sealing [37] to reduce land consumption and changes in the LULC [1]

5.     Lastly, the authors should follow a uniform format for referencing, as some of the references have journal names written in full, others are abbreviated (for example, reference # 43).

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

The biggest and most obvious issue with this paper is the quality of the English. The authors can obviously write at a high level but there are many grammatical mistakes. Some paragraphs are fine, but others are choppy to the point where it's distracting. 

I don't have any other major comments on a first read-through, but would be happy to reconsider the paper after revisions.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

More editing is needed. The English is generally good, but this is not yet publication quality, with many grammatical mistakes. I've gone through the first dozen or so pages, and offer some suggestions about where edits are needed, but there may be more than what I've listed here. I would also advise the authors to consider breaking up some of the longer sentences, and perhaps limit themselves to one or two commas per sentence. If those changes are made, I have no problem with recommending for publication. 

More specific comments:

Page 1, line 16: change "it lacks" to "they lack"

Page 1, line 23: "prospective" is the wrong word here, try "potential" or similar

Page 1, line 43: Change "not" to "no" as in "...there are no signs..."

Page 2, line 46: Same as previous comment, change "not" to "no"

Page 2, line 64: change "influences" to "influence" -- also this sentence in general could use some editing as it doesn't flow very well.

Page 2, line 71: change "able" to "that are able"

Page 2, line 79, change "used datasets" to "datasets used"

Page 2, line 88: edit this sentence "...it is getting more and more relevance the impact..." 

Page 3, line 117: I don't think "careless" is the word you're looking for here.

Page 3, line 139: this clause needs editing "to which add the increase"

Page 4, line 155: Not sure if "abusive" fits here either.

Page 9, line 327: Change "At last" to "Lastly"

Page 9, line 328: Edit needed on " Very useful instrument, since it allows to direct visualize..."

Page 9, line 343: change "review" to "reviews"

Page 10, line 363: Change "At last" to "Lastly"

Page 10, line 376: Edit needed on "Indeed, along this procedure..."

Page 11, line 419: "Following" needs another word, like "Following that"

Page 11, line 441: I'm not sure what this means "Moreover, not permanent changes are often detected..." but might be more like "Moreover, changes that are not permanent are often detected..."

Author Response

We have made changes as required, except for: 

Page 1, line 16 – change "it lacks" to "they lack". We decided to keep "it lacks" because it refers to "a methodical and extensive review in the specific field of land consumption monitoring" (singular)

Page 4, line 155: Not sure if "abusive" fits here either. We decided to keep "abusive", because we think it is the right word in that context.

 

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

Point 1: The reviewer recommends defining explicitly ‘land consumption’ in the first part of the introduction to help the readers understand what aspects of this land consumption the review paper covers.

Point 2: The authors provided tables and graphs from their literature search. However, the information gathered from the literature search needed to be maximized to help the readers explicitly find the research gap and (or) areas where critical improvements need to be addressed. Section 3 needed to cluster better areas for comparison and discussion. Specifically, the authors provided details of methods used in the literature. However, they needed to provide their thoughts on limitations and possible innovations that could motivate the readers or generate new ideas and (or) arguments. Likewise, clustering the literature survey results into specific application areas needs to be improved based on the definition of land consumption.

Point 3: The reviewer suggests providing shorter paragraphs on general knowledge, specifically in the introduction.

Point 4: The reviewer recommends providing more appropriate graphs or plots showing statistics or trends and explaining why the numbers follow such trends.

Point 5: Kindly include ‘and’ between the third and last authors and remove the comma after the third author.

Point 6: Kindly also provide the email address of each author in the affiliation section.

Point 7: Kindly define all abbreviations first during their first appearance in the abstract and main text and use these abbreviations consistently throughout the paper.

Point 8: Avoid writing into many paragraphs per section with one or two sentences per paragraph.

Point 9: The font size used in the figures must be legible. Kindly increase the font size.

Point 10: Kindly follow the correct format of listing references.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript presents a systematic review of “Land consumption classification using Sentinel 1 data: a review”.

Generally, this study was completed through the systematic review of literature from 2016 to March 2022. The systematic review clearly presents its objectives and can make an important contribution by highlighting the land consumption using Sentinel 1 data. This manuscript presents a systematic review in the specific field of Land Consumption Monitoring, concerning the application of SAR images, in particular Sentinel 1 images. This study was conducted to investigate the potential of Sentinel-1 images for estimating the land consumption using mathematical modelling, focusing on innovative approaches. Therefore, the current systematic review was organized into three main steps: (1) searching for relevant papers, (2) collecting information needed from each study, and (3) comparing the accuracy of the existing methods to evaluate soil sealing and their applied conditions using Sentinel-1 Images.  

The methodology in the current manuscript is detailed and allow such procedures to be applied in other areas of interest. Similarly, the results are detailed and consistent with the procedures used. However, there are some aspects of the manuscript that I believe should be addressed by the authors before publication.  The text needs editing to correct typographical, grammatical and spelling mistakes.

1.     I suggest the title of this manuscript may be modified as, “Land consumption classification using Sentinel 1 data: A systematic review”

2.     Line # 11, please explain SAR in the abstract. This needs to be written as “Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR)”.

3.     The key-words should be alphabetically arranged.

4.     Line # 33-34, This sentence may be corrected as, “Moreover, assessing the growth pace of land consumption is important in light of the European objectives

5.     The paragraphs are too short in many locations within the manuscript. Like for example just a single sentence paragraph (Line #37-38).

6.     Line # 83-85, Please correct this sentence, “Indeed, it is getting more and more relevance the impact of the land cover on land surface temperature, biodiversity, evapotranspiration, groundwater table, peak runoff, infiltration, stormwater, pollution, imperviousness etc”.

7.     Line #86, the abbreviation may be used for the “land use/land cover” as “LULC”.

8.     Line #147-148, This sentences needs to be referenced as, “In the context of increasing urban population and economic development, the built-up areas have been widely expanding in the large urban centers at global level (Sultan et al. 2022)”.

·       Sultan, H., Rashid, W., Shi, J., Rahim, I.u., Nafees, M., Bohnett, E., Rashid, S., Khan, M.T., Shah, I.A., Han, H., Ariza-Montes, A., 2022. Horizon Scan of Transboundary Concerns Impacting Snow Leopard Landscapes in Asia. Land 11, 248-269. https://doi.org/10.3390/land11020248

9.     Line # 166-167, Please revise this sentence as, “As a result, substantial data gaps exist in spatio-temporal domains

10.  Please check the short paragraphs of just a single sentence line #170-171 and line #172-173.

11.  Please check abbreviations such as SAR, LULC, NDVI, LCZs, BCI etc. that should be written in full at first appearance, then followed by abbreviated form throughout the manuscript. Currently, they are used interchangeably, like for example line # 172 and then line # 174, line # 214-215, line #343, line #369, line 503, line #408, line #416

1.     Line # 243-246 is the limitation of the study and need to referenced, “Then, the specific search was limited to peer-reviewed journal papers, after removing review papers (as they are not original methods for land consumption monitoring), conference review (for the same reason before), erratum, and articles still in press. Only articles in English languages were included in the current study (REFERENCE).

13.  Please check the font type and font size in Table 1. Currently different font types are used in this table.

14.  I think the time period for this systematic review is not appropriate. The time period is from 2014 to March 2022. It is just three months in 2022 and does not show the whole year. I suggest the time period should be from 2014 to 2022 (till 31st December 2022), to reveal number of publications in the whole year.

15.  Please use uniform terminology in the manuscript. Currently, the articles selected for this systematic review are referred as “papers”, “studies” and “documents”. I think this will creates confusion for the readers.

16.  I think the figure 1 must be referred in the text.

17.  The quality of the figures may be improved to meet the requirement of the journal.

18.  Please check the citation style, I think in some locations the citation may be like line #381, the [16] be written as “Mastrorosa [16]”. Please check all over the manuscript.

19.  In table 3, please check the font size and font type. Also the citation style of the paper.

20.  The caption for the Table 3 may be written as “ Summary of the analyzed articles”

21.  Lastly, the authors should follow a uniform format for referencing, as some of the references have journal names written in full, others are abbreviated and some are written in italics.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

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