Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reveal the topographic effect on habitat quality in mountainous areas

Summary

The study explored the change trend of habitat quality in mountainous areas, the distribution, change trend and topographic gradient effect of the habitat quality using InVEST model, topographic distribution index and Mann-Kendall method over the period of 2000 to 2020. The study has scientific merits, and following are the feedback for improving the manuscript.

Review Feedback

1.      In section 2.2 Data, resolution of Land use data has not been mentioned.  Figure 2 shows the use of Landsat 5 TM, ETM+, OLI and GF-1 satellite images for creating Land use type data.
It has not been mentioned in the data section. Also, The sources of remote sensing data has not been cited or acknowledged. The flow chart also does not mention using Land use data from Resource and Environmental Science Data Center.

2.      Reference provided for equation (2), Foster et al. 2017, Nelson et al. 2009 & Satir et al. 2016 does not contain this formula. Wu et al. 2013 was not checked due to language barriers.

3.      Line 118 describes, Y_r  as number of threat sources whereas it should be described as ‘grid number of threats’.

4.      Line 117 ‘habitat degradation index’ needs to be written as ‘Habitat Degradation Index’

5.      Line 125 Capitalize first letter of each word of ‘habitat quality index’

6.      Line 147 Capitalize first letter of each word ‘topographic distribution index’

7.      Line 148 Capitalize first letter of each word ‘topographic potential index’

8.      Line 155 describes ?¯ as average slope of the point whereas it should be average slope of the area.

9.      Line 157 Capitalize first letter of each word ‘topographic location distribution index’

10.   Equation 4 is using ‘topographic area class’ as one of the variables. This needs to be addressed that whether this is considering terrain potential index classes. 

11.   Section 3 Results, uses ‘forest’ as one of the classes while describing the results whereas Table 2, Figure 3 & 4 use the word ‘woodland’ as class.

12.    Definition and formula for calculation of ‘Change Ratio’, Distribution proportion’ & ‘Area Proportion’ is required.

13.   Section 3.2 Distribution of habitat quality on different levels of terrain, has only two subsections but the second one is marked as (3). Also, the significance of results in this section needs to be more elaborate on their meaning

14.   Line 308 and 357 mentions that livelihood of people is excessively dependent on forests and grasslands. More details for the kind of livelihood will paint a better picture on how these activities are a threat for ecological environment.  

15.   For figure 13, the background of the figure makes it difficult to understand the direction of change from one land type to another.

16.   There are no maps of Land use/Land cover of the study area for any year shown in the manuscript. Different years map would help the reader to understand the spatial distribution of various land cover classes.

17.   Title of the manuscript can be changed as “Assessment of Topographic effect on habitat quality in mountainous area using InVEST model”

18.   Equations (1), (3) and (4) needs to be completely changed using EQUATIONS EDITOR in a correct mathematical way. Numerator and Denominator are confusing. Also the size of Summation Symbol within the parentheses should be smaller than the summation outside.

19.   The notations used in the equation (1) is totally confusing. The scalar used in representing range of summation values are also used as parameter inside the equation. For example “r”. Authors have not clearly revealed the parameters of the equations correctly. Let author give each parameter in a separate line.

20.   In equation (1) authors have used the word “stress” but this word is not found in other places of the manuscript. Authors could not link the equation (1) properly with the data used in the current study. The main weakness of the study is the explanation of equations and its parameters. It is mainly because of complex English. Hence, authors may take a help of some English experts and reframe the sentences and simplify scientifically. Instead of running text, use separate line for each parameter.

 

Overall, the manuscript requires a MAJOR REVISION.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments on the manuscripts (MS) “Reveal the topographic effect on habitat quality in mountain- 2 ous areas” by  Qing Xiang et al.

 

This article analyzes the topographic gradient effect of the temporal and spatial variation of habitat quality in mountainous areas, which is an interesting study. However, the argumentation of the article is not rigorous, and the analysis in this article cannot be enough to support its conclusion. Here are some suggestions and questions:

1. Professional terms need to be determined, such as law (line12), gradient (line15), etc.

2. Please add references to prove the reliability of the conclusions in lines 51-53.

3. lin84, please provide the source of the boundary data of the study area.

4. Line 146, some parts in the table are bolded, and some places are not bolded. What does the author want to express？

5. The land use data of the article is based on the data of Resource and Environmental Science Data Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the data of the Resource and Environmental Science Data Center of the Chinese Academy of Sciences include 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. The article is only three years old（2000、2010 and 2020）, and only three-year data is used for Mann-kendall analysis. The article also touches on trends in habitat change, however such a result is hardly convincing using three-period land use data. If conditions permit, it is recommended that this article use 20-year data. If it is indeed difficult to obtain data, it is recommended to use at least 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020 data for analysis.

6、The formulas in lines 115 and 116 are clearly expressed. It is recommended that the author should doublecheck.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors, this article brings significant contributions with analysis and methods to analyze the temporal and spatial changes of habitat quality from 2000 to 2020 and topographic gradient effect of temporal and spatial variation of habitat quality in mountainous areas.

I have the following comments and suggestions for including information and improvements.

 

General

All Figures and tables must be need more details in terms of presentation. All figures and tables need clarity in terms of their description.

Finding citations in the text for figures (2,6,7,9,12, and 13) was impossible. Please fix this issue.

 

Abstract

I suggest the authors add more information and details about the methods and results found. The current abstract does not contain information on this aspect, making it a fragile abstract.

Keywords: I suggest that authors include keywords not already contained in the title. This may help readers locate this article more efficiently as it has a broader range of search terms.

Introduction

The authors should illustrate more about the state of the art about models used to analyze the temporal and spatial changes of habitat quality.

A more explicit justification must be included regarding the importance of studying in different locations and counties. This information is essential to give a more general aspect to the study, helping it not appear that the results are only of local importance.

Methods  

 

More details must be included Data section.  For example, How were the images processing and subsequent classification carried out? Which land use and land cover classes were used? What is the accuracy of the maps used in the model?

All processing steps shown in figure 2 must be systematically described in another subsection after section 2.2 Data. This action is imperative for readers to understand the data and model processing steps.

 

In section 2.3 (InVEST model), The stages of choosing the Habitat threat factors and Habitat suitability and sensitivity variables must be better detailed. For example, it needs to be clarified why these variables were chosen and what criteria were used. Also, why choose InVEST model? It is essential to detail each of these questions.

 

In sections 2.4 topographic distribution index and 2.5 Mann-Kendall change detection, it is necessary to detail the assumptions for using these methods and the criteria for choosing them. These methods must be better described and detailed.

 

Another general question is, are all the analyses carried out? (This information only appears in the results). This information is essential for the replicability of your methods in other contexts.

 

What is the final spatial resolution of the habitat quality model? How did you deal with differences in spatial resolution between layers when building the model? This information must be included in the model description.

 

Results

 

To better present your results' the figures must be the same style. I suggest all graphs be created from the ggplot2 package in R.

I would like to see results derived from Mann Kendall's analyses. It was not possible to visualize this data in the results. 

Discussion

 

Only two situations were used in this section to discuss all the results found in the paper. This significantly impoverishes the discussion. It is imperative that authors dialogue with the literature. In this sense, Citations that give conceptual support to the results found in this section must be included. It is also imperative that the authors include a topic that compares the results of the methods and analyses proposed in the article with the literature results. The discussion should be restructured, considering the comments above. 

 

Conclusions

 

Conclusion inclusion will help readers obtain information more synthetically about the main results of the work and their possible applications. In this section, I suggest that information be added about future advances in this field of research, based on the results found in this article.

 

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Can be accepted.

Reviewer 3 Report

The author has carefully examined the comments and made suitable manuscript changes to address them. I am satisfied with their response.