The Historical Transformation of Peri-Urban Land Use Patterns, via Landscape GIS-Based Analysis and Landscape Metrics, in the Vesuvius Area

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments:

This paper presents an interesting work on Naples's land use and landscape changes. However, the main concerns with its further improvements can be found below. I look forward to reading your revision very much as it is a paper of high potential. Thanks for presenting such a long-term study in Naples.

The introduction jumps from agro-forestry to peri-urban concepts. The former is a potential dominant type of the latter (peri-urban) one. The relationships between these two should be claimed clearly to reduce confusion. Other parts are very well written, such as the Fragstats depiction. Well done dear authors!

The highlights of this paper are their historical maps and evaluation.

The methodology is relatively well-written, however, some concerns arise such as

1. how did you distinguish urban agricultural and sparse vegetation?

2. Is it very easy to defer vineyards forests from other types of forests?

3. Is there a change of urban/rural boundaries since 1817? If so, which year's boundary you have used for analysis? I saw you use different boundaries for each map. Could you please justify and explain more about your boundary selection, i.e. 1875-1907 for map 1817 and 1960 for map 1875-1907? It matters a lot for your results and findings interpretation.

For results, it is a very interesting Section, especially the landscape metrics part. Well done!

For the results in land-use changes, would it be possible to compare this method with the land-use change matrix? It would be very inspiring and enrich your discussion substantially.

For discussion, I would suggest reframing and structuring it first before going through a more detailed review. It is not smart to include new data (e.g. resident population and increase of urban areas) in the Discussion.

Minor comments:

line number Comments

line 70 plz use Land cover, instead of land coverage. In LULC research, we have very strict definitions for both concepts by FAO and I assume you refer to the differences between land use and land cover.

92 Do you mean LULC? why LUC?

120 peri-sub-urban, not peri-urban? What is the difference then?

135 happened and changed? I would suggest revising your research questions to make them more explicit.

line 141-135, you have the aim of your work and the general aim of your paper. What are their differences? Reframing it clearly by combining both and logically connected would substantially facilitate the audience.

Figure 2, sorry, your legend is too small to read. Which year of maps do you refer to?

233 urban-periurban? It is not English words, sorry.

239 why ground control points are needed here? What is the GCPs method for?

345 spatial extent?

Figure 3-5 What does 1875-1907 refer to? How did you get this map, by intersecting or overlapping or what? It is easy to be confused about its value, although I understand the authors' purpose.

521-522 What does high permanence mean? From natural to semi-natural to human-made, how the permanence and KHisto would change?

Table 10 What is the spatial resolution of your data? I am afraid the table with cell units makes little sense. It would be better to change them as ha.

Author Response

Please, see the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a potentially interesting submission that uses historical cartographic production to investigate what has happened in the Vesuvius context. The topic has merit and seems to fit well with the scope of the journal. The article is easy to read and gives a well-presented overview of change in the study area. There are some major concerns as follows:

1. Line 70-76, The difference between land use and land cover is explained, but it is not reflected in the classification results (as shown in Table 1), so it is suggested that the content of this part should be deleted directly.
2. Historical images, especially 1817 and 1907, are very precious and are suggested to be displayed in the Materials section (2.1.1).
3. The classification results of each period are the basis of change detection and landscape analysis, so the accuracy of classification results is very important, but how to evaluate the accuracy of classification results is not mentioned in the paper.

Author Response

Please, see the attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for addressing all my comments in a good manner. Please have careful proofreading before it gets published. Congrats!

Reviewer 2 Report

I would like to thank the authors for their careful revision.