The Influence of Environmental Change (Crops and Water) on Population Redistribution in Mexico and Ethiopia
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I have two major comments regarding the manuscript entitled "The influence Environmental Change on Population Redistribution in Mexico and Ethiopia" submitted to Applied Sciences by Xia et al, that I list below:
1) My main comment is regarding the presentation of this work. The author should do a much better job in presenting their results and organization of the paper. The English language also needs to get improved. For example, figure 2 is very difficult to understand with small panels and fonts. Another example is sections of the paper, there is a Conclusion section in the paper, but it is BEFORE the discussion. I do not know why the authors have the conclusion before discussing their results. Verb tenses and articles and their choices of words must also be improved. For example: "The 20th century saw the biggest increase in..." is not the right way to say this in a academic paper. Similarly: "To get more regular conclusions..." is not a right phrase for a science paper, and it is not clear what the sentence is referring to. What do you mean by "regular conclusions". There are many incorrect usage of verb tenses throughout the paper too. The paper needs a throughout proofread by a native speaker.
2) My second comment is regarding the study sites. From the paper is not clear why Mexico and Ethiopia. I think the authors should to a much better job in clarifying why they have chosen these two countries and how the results can be applied to other regions.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript evaluated the influence of changes in crop production and water resources on the population redistribution in Mexico and Ethiopia. While the questions assessed in the paper are interesting, I have two major concerns. First, the introduction does not explicitly inform the importance of the assessment for Mexico and Ethiopia. Second, it is not clear from the methodology that how the influence of crop and water are separated from the influence of other related factors of population redistribution (e.g., poverty, war etc.). The writing is relatively weak with frequent grammatical mistakes and inconsistency of tenses that will require a thorough editing. There are a few other minor comments as follows.
Title: Insert ‘of’ in between ‘influence’ and ‘environmental’. However, the title could be revised with inclusion of the ‘influence of crop and water’.
Abstract: The ‘long-term’ and ‘short-term’ environmental changes should be defined. Also, there is no quantitative result in the abstract.
Line 54-57, 72-74: Examples of incorrect writing. Should be revised.
Line 120-123: Only average climatic conditions are considered, while extreme wet and dry events may significantly affect the water and agricultural systems (see Chowdhury et al., 2019). Authors should extend their assessments for the extreme climatic conditions.
Reference:
Chowdhury, AK, Kar, KK, Shahid, S., Chowdhury, R., and Rashid, MM, (2019). Evaluation of spatio-temporal rainfall variability and performance of a stochastic rainfall model in Bangladesh. International Journal of Climatology, doi: 10.1002/joc.6071.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
In the revised version, authors have addressed the major scientific issues raised in the review of the previous version. However, in the abstract, the reported correlation coefficients between crop yield deviation and population redistribution are greater than one, which is unlikely. According to the results in Table 3, these correlations seem to be insignificant as the adjusted r-square values are in the order of 0.02, 0.37, and 0.26 for Model 1, 2, and 3 respectively. Authors should justify these results and revise the relevant discussions and conclusions. In addition, Figures 3 and 4 should be revised as the legends of the existing plots are unclear.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
