Geomorphological Evolution of the Sena Gallica Site in the Morpho-Evolutive Quaternary Context of the Northern-Marche Coastal Sector (Italy)
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is an interesting article on geomofological reconstruction of Senigallia landscape. I think it's a good theoretical work: however this article should be completed with more discussion and description of the methods used. I recommend to use the template of Geosciences journal.
- Introduction and Geological Settings are too descriptive chapters. I consider that both chapters must be improved in a very real discussion about the goals of this work.
1.- Introduction:
Lack a more extensive discussion on the scientific problem of the subject.
Lack the improvement and novelties of this work respect to those already developed in the same territory by the same research group (or others)
The introduction must provide more information about the content, opportunity and scientific goals of the article
2.- Geological Settings are too descriptive chapter…It´s really necessary?
3.- Lack a chapter on material and methods that allows to really evaluate the novelty of this work. Chapter 3 is a chapter of historiographical discussion rather than discussion of scientific problems analyzed. It is a good chapter, but its value cannot be identified if it is not described before how it has been studied.
For example, how the coastal alluvial fans and their role in the evolution of the Holocenic coastal plains has been studied? How the reconstruction of these depositional fans has been configured?
An extensive chapter describing the methodologies used to support the conclusions must be provided.
4.- There are no conclusions. There is a resume of ideas already discussed in chapter 3.
Authors must provide conclusions about what this work really advances and where this work leaves the state of research on the subject.
Figures:
Figure 1: Please, indicate north, coordinates and cartographic databases property.
Figure 2: Please add copyright
Figure 4: How and where this figure modified [49], Figure 5? Please make more clear and descrptive the captions information.
Figure 5 and 6: please add copyright and a more descriptive text.
Author Response
Dear Colleague,
resubmitting the revised version of our work “Geological Outline and Geomorphological Evolution of the Sena Gallica Site in the Morpho-evolutive Quaternary Context of the Northern Marche Coastal Sector (Italy)”, we decide to shorten the title in “Geomorphological Evolution of the Sena Gallica Site in the Morpho-evolutive Quaternary Context of the Northern Marche Coastal Sector (Italy)” due to major changes in the text as request by reviewers.
We accepted all of the suggestions of the reviewers modifying the text as we show in yellow in the manuscript.
Reviewer 1
Introduction
We modify the introduction inserting the aims of this work and the reduced geological setting
Geological setting
As suggested we eliminated this chapter inserting some description in the introduction
Lack of chapter on material and methods…
We inserted this new chapter as requested
Conclusions
We rewrite the Concluding Remarks chapter pointing out the main results of this study.
Figures
We eliminate the previous Figure 2 and we modified the figures and captions as suggested.
About the English language, we received the revision of our text from the MDPI English Editing Service.
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper is very interesting and original
The work should be better structured: after the Introduction you should describe “Materials and Methods”, Results and Discussion, conclusion as the journal require
In the “Introduction” the aims of the work are missing
Geological setting is too long for the themes of the paper, it could be reduced to a few lines and inserted into the geomorphological evolution as brief introduction.
You have to arrange the references as required by the journal (e.g. year, bold font; Abbreviated Journal Name, Italic font; Volume, Italic font without vol.; page range without pp.; add DOI if available)
line 29 – Figure 1 Geological setting scheme (add setting)
line 32 after” plain/river mouth” add the dot
line 126 remove however
line 131 replace valley with plain
line 131 replace the last periglacial age with Last Glacial Maximum (LGM)
line 155 remove comma after probably
line 158 add Elmi et al. before [5] pointed ….
line 226 replace estuary with river mouth
line 230 replace era with Epoch
line 237 replace end with and
line 242 replace era with Epoch
line 242 replace periglacial with glacial
line 252 replace era with Epoch
line 278 replace Meturo with Metauro
line 280 replace estuaries with mouths
line 298 remove comma after ..1100 AD)
line 378 – Figure 5 a) and b), named in the caption, there isn’t in the figure. The wave-cut scarp does not look good
line 464 replace circa with about
Author Response
Dear Colleague,
resubmitting the revised version of our work “Geological Outline and Geomorphological Evolution of the Sena Gallica Site in the Morpho-evolutive Quaternary Context of the Northern Marche Coastal Sector (Italy)”, we decide to shorten the title in “Geomorphological Evolution of the Sena Gallica Site in the Morpho-evolutive Quaternary Context of the Northern Marche Coastal Sector (Italy)” due to major changes in the text as request by reviewers.
We accepted all of the suggestions of the reviewers modifying the text as we show in yellow in the manuscript.
Reviewer 2
The work should be better structured…
We adopted the the journal require, inserting the chapters on Methods and Material, and Concluding Remarks
In the “Introduction” the aims of the work are missing
We inserted the aims in the Introduction chapter
Geological setting is too long for the themes of the paper,…
We eliminated this chapter and figure 2. We inserted some geological setting information in the Introduction chapter
References
We arranged the references as request by journal. Many bias were done by using Sotero software.
Errors
We corrected all the errors highlighted by the reviewer.
Finally, the English editing service corrected the text.
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors; the changes you introduced are not illustrative of the methods you have used. You list a list of resources without any specification. You write only that you have done many tests with remote sensing methods: "surveys were supported by digital tools (tablet pc and GPS receivers) with mobile GIS (Qgis software with ad-hoc developed plug-ins)" or "Geophysical prospections represent important contributions to the dataset of this work Resistivity, seismic, ground penetrating radar and electromagnetic techniques were exploited to capture information in the urban area where non-invasive methods are required "... in all of them you cite bibliographical references....
I have two questions:
- What are the materials and techniques you have used specifically for this work?
- What novelty add the techniques you used in this work to your previous works?.
The work has no real conclusions (again).
How have your methods been efficient in this investigation? (goals, strengths and weaknesses...)
What methods have been better?
What is the progress of your research in this work regarding previous results? or where does the research stay after this work?
...
A true chapter of conclusions regarding the methods, techniques and results obtained is lacking.
Author Response
Dear Colleague,
During the revision of the article “Geomorphological Evolution of the Sena Gallica Site in the Morphoevolutive Quaternary Context of the Northern-Marche Coastal Sector (Italy)”, we appreciated your suggestions and comments. Certainly, they improved the text.
We delete the chapter on subsurface geology inserting some information in the introduction and we wrote the new chapter on Material and Methods. This chapter has been inserted mainly because the structure of the article for Geosciences journal requires it.
We must underline that this paper is not a new field or lab research but it is a new synthesis and interpretation derived from our previous works: these were fragmented into various notes and partial geomorphological or archaeological presentations, but we never merged into a single summary article. Therefore, we are going to explain this point in the text better, but we cannot write anything about the novelty coming from the techniques explained in this work. Because of this reason, we cited the references of the works for which those methods and techniques were previously used.
About Conclusions chapter, we quote the instruction for authors (https://www.mdpi.com/journal/geosciences/instructions) that “Conclusions: This section is not mandatory, but can be added to the manuscript if the discussion is unusually long or complex”.
We followed your suggestions because the new evolutionary interpretation we propose is quite long and complex. Therefore, we agree that it is better to remark the main points of novelty and progress of our interpretation. But your answers about methods and state of the research are not relevant for this paper which propose a new synthesis of the Quaternary evolution of this sector.
Finally, the English editing service corrected the text and we also eliminated some spelling bias.
Best Regards
prof. Mauro De Donatis
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors, thank you very much for your comments. I remain in my position.
Author Response
Dear collegue,
in order to try to get closer to your position, we followed the suggestion of the Academic Editor. We hope to meet your requests, as far as we can.
Thank you for your work which improved our paper.
Best Regards.
Mauro De Donatis and co-authors.
