Temporal (1948–2012) and Dynamic Evolution of the Wouri Estuary Coastline within the Gulf of Guinea

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors have tried to quantify the temporal and dynamic evolution of coastline within the Gulf of Guinea focused on Cameroon regions. The work is very interesting and as authors stated few such studies are done, it could be good information to the environment and coastal community.

However, the manuscript currently presented is very hard to follow and is not suitable to be an academic article in the current stage.

The manuscript does not follow the formatting of the journal and guidelines. Please follow https://www.mdpi.com/files/word-templates/jmse-template.dot .

The abstract is also too big and must be according to the guideline. For better writing instruction see this once: https://www.nature.com/documents/nature-summary-paragraph.pdf

Reference also is very randomly added in the manuscript and are quite a lot. Are those all the actual articles that provide the basis of the work. Please use only informative references and not all. This is not a thesis but a manuscript which needs to be very specific on what information was extracted from previous studies. Also, see the reference style in the template of JMSE.

The introduction is also not very connected, and the objective of the work does not seem very strong to support the work. Please rewrite the whole introduction in a logical order from problems, solutions to previous studies, lacking and what new information you are trying to give to the community form this.

Rather than stating various studies and few works etc., please explain works and their summary with lacking such as for 25, 26, 28.

Inconsistency in abbreviation, choice of works, units and spacing can be found all over the manuscript. Please be very careful while formatting and writing a manuscript.

Punctuation and grammar are very poor.

As per the authors in Table 2, the planimetric errors of the data are around 35 and 21 meters. In such a case, how these different resolution data were normalized for the comparison.

Please add a workflow of the study from data pre-processing steps, methods and comparative steps all included so that the whole work can be visualized properly. It is very difficult to understand what authors have done from what data and how.

Please explain all the methods properly Net Shoreline Movement (NSM), End Point Rate (EPR), Linear Rate Regression (LRR) and Weighted Linear Regression (WLR) and do use their abbreviation, description and analysis in the same order over the manuscript.

Provide good reference on how and where these methods were used in coastal studies.

Please follow the work once and try to revise the work accordingly. https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/6/3/68

L242 what is MSN method?

The maps, tables and explanations are not easily understandable and very difficult to visualize the work. Please try to read more similar research works and revise all the manuscript.

An explanation should be provided on the shoreline length, erosion rate transects on erosion and accretion etc.

Is table 7 and figure 9 same, do not use redundant information, use either table or graph or map only and explain in a simple informative way than adding all the information repetitively.

L149 What is this (RMSE square error (ERMs))? There is RMSE or MSE to my knowledge, please explain what is ERMs? Also explain simply how these are useful in this work, Ep, EP and Ed.

Fig 5, thicker lines blur the information, make than with high contract but thin to see. And which is figure b, I could not see or understand that.

Also, do explain the purpose of figure 8 and explain the information readers should take a form that in the manuscript.

Fig 10, I am not very convinced by GE photos and KML digitalization as GE images are not properly referenced and can shift that much. GE cannot be always trusted. A more reliable Landsat or SPOT/GEOEYE images would be better. I do not know the area well, but the road lines are visible and seem to be not so much shifted as if the whole city is missing. In such a case cadastral map of the area is very good proof, if authors can, do provide that and match with current house information.

I think there is a typo for no, which is all over the text.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We are grateful for your constructive comments, which have allowed us to improve our manuscript. Please see the attachment a detailed explanation of how we considered the comments.

Best regard

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This paper used three sets of topographical data to analyse estuarine evolution for past 60 years. Authors had done a great job to collect the data and make the calculation of the change rates in the area. Result looks reasonable and straight forwards, and easy to read. However, scientific aspect is soundlessly and show no enough evidences in the way to pursue reader in terms of the reason for coastline changing. 

However, I would say that this manuscript can be accepted to be published due to its novelty in the ecologic approach, but some minor modifications need to be done:

1) redundant figures and tables are present, need to be reduced

2) sequence of figures shown in the content is in disorder (line 349 for example).

3) there is no evidence showing the coast migration related to climate change or rise of water level

4) the overall sediment budget seems to be balanced in the area, why is that? 

  

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Wa are grateful for you constructive comments, which have allowed us to improve our manuscript. Please see the attachment a detailed explanation of how we considered the comments.

 Best Regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, 

I appreciate the effort in replying all the comments. But I do not see them included in the manuscript. Comments are doubted that could possibly be raised by readers and this replies must be included so that future reader can understand.

Besides including all the comments replies, do add the figures of workflow and replace the GE image with Landsat. After that, it can be considered.

And please see the template of the journal https://www.mdpi.com/files/word-templates/jmse-template.dot , it is still very poorly formatted. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,
We are grateful for your constructive comments that have allowed us to improve our manuscript.
Please see the attachment a detailed explanation of the answer to your questions.
Best Regards.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, well done in adding all the comments replies. Still, formatting is not as per the journal, I hope journal editors will improve that.