Global Open Data Remote Sensing Satellite Missions for Land Monitoring and Conservation: A Review

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper summarizes the main data from satellite missions on land monitoring. The authors must provide the authenticity of the Figure 2. Is the figure done by the authors or is cited by another work. From which work are citted the Figures 3, 4, 6,7,8,9 and 10?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This article is a useful review about the processing and applications of open data from optical and radar satellite data, focusing on the most common satellite missions and on land monitoring applications. It is well structured and in general it is clear. Thus I just have some minor comments:

- line 18 and 18: “… according to the number of scientific research articles published…” instead “… according to the number of scientific research published…”

- line 36: “… spectrum with an observed land cover” or “… spectrum with an observed object” instead of “… spectrum with an observed land”

- line 44: does not make sense to mention here such a specific topic such as “remediating contamination”

- line 63: why quoting Mokhtari et al.? It should be a review paper or a meta-analysis

- Figure 2: why are SWIR and Thermal bands of Landsat and MODIS excluded? They are very important for land monitoring

- lines 203 and 204: a reference should support this sentence: “The two most widely used global digital height models are the SRTM and the ASTER owned by NASA.”

- line 217: consider the title “Methods of processing and analyzing remotely sensed data”

- Figure 4: the names of S2 bands may be confusing; add bands number. The composite for Agriculture uses 10m and 20m S2 bands. It should be clear how was done.

- section 3.2: Normalized Difference Water Index (NDWI) should also be mentioned, since it is very important for monitoring water content of vegetation.

- line 314 and 315: “NDVI … it has a deficiency in the form of low sensitivity to differences in the vegetation properties in case of high chlorophyll content and biomass”. This could be mentioned not as a deficiency but as a limitation, describing the effect of the high loads of biomass on NDVI, i.e. the saturation effect.

- line 347 – 350: “Classification in the number of classes de fined by the operator can be performed either without its additional influence on the classification process (unsupervised classification) or by determining the training dataset containing representative samples of individual classes based on field observations or visual identification on the images (supervised classification).” This sentence is confusing, I don’t understand its sense.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is really a nice story about remote sensing data that are open to the public. I like a lot the paper and it has value. I suggest to accept it as it is. thx!

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

Reviews of Manuscript No.: 977237

Title: Global Open Data Remote Sensing Satellite Missions for Land Monitoring and Conservation: A Review

Author(s): Dorijan Radočaj, Jasmina Obhođaš, Mladen Jurišić, Mateo Gašparović

Overall conclusions and recommendations:

Recently, global open data remote sensing satellite missions are widely used in land monitoring and conservation studies. Authors write this manuscript to provide a review of the most important global open data remote sensing satellite missions, current state-of-the-art processing methods and applications in land monitoring and conservation studies. Authors summary the scientific references involved in global open data satellite missions including multispectral (Landsat, Sentinel-2 and MODIS), radar (Sentinel-1) and digital elevation model missions (SRTM, ASTER). This manuscript also analyses the processing methods of these missions’ data consisting of image preprocessing, spectral indices, image classification methods and modelling of terrain topographic parameters. Furthermore, this manuscript presents the possibilities of their application in land cover, land suitability, vegetation monitoring and natural disaster management were evaluated, having high potential in broad use worldwide.

The study is within the scope of the journal Land, and its topic and conclusions could attract the interest of readers working in areas of land cover change and remote sensing. This manuscript has a good structure and English writing. It is easy to follow. Personally, I do not have more comment on it. I recommend the journal publish this work.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf