Dynamic Coastal-Shelf Seascapes to Support Marine Policies Using Operational Coastal Oceanography: The French Example
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The submitted manuscript proposes a new description and characterization of seascapes in time and space on the North-Eastern Atlantic Ocean region. I find the work relevant to the audience of ‘Journal of Marine Science‘ Journal. My recommendation is minor revision as I think the manuscript in the present form is not ‘mature’ enough for publication even if the authors present their efforts in a good way. I elaborate on this hereinafter.
My main concern is that the authors should review section dealing with material and methods. More particularly, the reader needs to better understand why those Essential Ocean Variables (EOVs) or sub-variables (Sub-EOVs) have been used instead of others one (e.g. wave climate variables or even chemical components variables).
Also, the authors should revisit section 2.4.2, 2.4.3 and 2.4.4 perhaps by illustrating their work with figures to make it clearer for the reader.
Some minor comments, issues to discuss:
l.1-11: In the abstract, the reader needs to know where the method have been applied.
l.9: ‘oceanographically’?
l.29: ‘and’ instead of ‘/’.
l.32: ‘throughput’?
l.47-49: ‘within the framework of the policy-oriented marine Environmental Research for the Southern European Seas project (PERSEUS, [12]) and the Marine Ecosystem Response in the Mediterranean EXperiment (MERMEX) project.’ This part is not essential.
l.54: ‘John Steele’ the citation format is not homogeneous with l. 55 for instance. The name of the author should not appear.
l.56-66: I find this paragraph a bit long. You could try to shorten it by synthesizing the main message.
l.67-91: Again, I find this paragraph too long and the reader could be a bit lost. You should try to shorten it.
l.98: Please add a reference.
l.104-107: ‘, the integration of dynamics into an ocean partitioning which may then include human consideration, and thus for the ecosystem assessment asked by marine policies [33,34], notably through the European Copernicus Marine Environment and Monitoring service (CMEMS).’ I found this paragraph confusing and not essential.
l.110 : add a reference for HYCOM
l.113 : the concept of ‘human dimension’ is not clear for me. Please reconsider.
l.121 : add a reference.
l.124-133 : I find this part not essential here. Maybe you could shorten by adding references.
l.140 : add a reference for HOMONIM.
Figure 1 : You could add names of the French MSFD sub marine regions on the figure to make it clearer for the reader.
l.142 : a reference for PSY2V4R4.
l.150 : the term ‘etc’ should not appear. Either you precise which others forcing are used or you specify that you only mention the most important variables.
l.151 : Add a reference for ARPEGE.
l.153 : reference or website for CDOCO?
l.158 : ‘sea surface height’? Sea surface elevation is more commonly used. Please reconsider here and further in the text.
l.160-161 : ‘Because of the variable vertical coordinate system, the thickness of each vertical layer was also output from the model.’. This sentence is not necessary for the reader.
l.165-167 : ’Hydrological variables have been calculated as in [15]: mixed layer depth (MLD), deficit of potential energy (DPE), sea surface temperature (SST), sea surface salinity (SSS), SST gradients (GRADSST) and SSS gradients (GRADSSS).’ Please respect the same order for description of each variable as in Figure 2a-f.
l.176 : a comma between ‘height’ and ‘H0’?
l.176-177 : …‘where h is the sea surface height H0 + h is the minimum depth between 200 m and the total water depth’… This is not clear for me…
Figure 2 : I found this figure essential as it helps the reader to better understand why those variables are essential and how dynamic is the study site. However, the figure really needs to be bigger. The authors should find a way to increase the visibility.
l.187 : ‘Root Mean Square of low frequency currents filtered of the tidal component (RMS_FILT)’. It is not clear how the root mean square is computed? Is it over 1 month? This need to be specified.
l.188 : ‘Okubo-Wiss criterion’. This variable is not well known and need to be detailed at the time it is submitted.
l.195-196 : ‘EKE and MKE’. You should respect the order that you used just after for equations (2) and (3). In a more general way, I found l. 188-196 unclear. For instance, I do not understand why these dynamic variables have been calculated at a near-surface reference depth of 10 m rather than averaging over the water column. Also, you should avoid back-and-forth with different variables (l. 188-203) to improve readability. Last thing, we need to understand better why these variables are more useful than for instance something dealing with wave climate.
l.197 : remove ‘for example’.
l.206 : The reader needs to better understand why did you average each variable ‘monthly’ and not weekly or on the contrary over a longer period (for instance 90 days)?
l.206-209 : I do not really like the term ‘pixel’. Please reconsider.
l.217 : please add references.
l.222 : ‘ward’s’?
Figure 3 : Same remark as for figure 2.
l.211-234 : You should at least provide figures S1 as part of the text and not as a supplementary material. Maybe you should propose another way to visualize data exposed in figure S1 such as an histogram plot. The reader also needs another illustration with for instance the methodology applied over 1 month with the associated clusters to better understand this section.
l.232-234 : This is not essential for the reader I think.
l.237 : ‘response variable’?
l.243 : you should propose a ‘mathematical’ name instead of a ‘R’ package.
l.246 : It would be interesting to see a figure ‘observations vs simulations‘ with the associated R² and the Brief Skill Score. What do you think?
l.247-250 : not clear for me.
l.249: ‘sampling bag’
l.252-253 : this is not essential for the reader I think.
l.267 : the term ‘previously’ is confusing.
l.270-272 : This is already known by the reader.
l.273-274 : this is not essential I think.
l.273-308 : I think this should come after section 3.2 (l. 309-356).
l.314 : You should propose a plot instead of table 4. It would be easier to read.
l.386 : ‘Figure 6b’ instead of ‘figure 6’.
Table 5 : You should order the table with seascape and patch name.
Figure 6 : You should make the figure bigger. You could remove Figure 6b and plot interface between median patches on the same figure a) with for instance crosshatched area.
l.392-397 : please add references for ‘OCO’, ‘GOS’, ‘CMEMS’.
l.430-438 : I found this paragraph a bit long. Maybe you could try to shorten it.
l.392-517 : I found the discussion a bit long. Maybe you could try to shorten it.
l.520-527 : To simplify, you could reduce the number of steps by combining some of them.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This was an interesting paper, I look forward to it getting out and more work on the connection to biology. My comments and some suggested spelling/grammar edits are below.
All figures - The legend units throughout all figures are too small to read.
Figure 6 – 6a) is one of the quintessential products of this paper. It deserves to be bigger so that more spatial detail can be gleaned.
Table 2 - how was variable dominance defined? This was a useful table, but it’s possible a bar chart would have been easier to interpret.
3 do you mean a mosaic composed of these units?
7 how is this a hybrid process?
71-76 This is a mischaracterization of CMECS. CMECS does not largely relate to benthic substrate. Only 1 out of 4 CMECS components targets substrate. The other components including the water column are relevant to this study. It also includes a temporal persistence modifier important to acknowledge here. I also disagree with the characterization that CMECS does not follow the hierarchical point of view you describe. That’s exactly what CMECS was intended to do. (See Introduction of https://www.natureserve.org/sites/default/files/publications/files/cmecs_version_06-2012_final.pdf)
I agree that CMECS does not adequately characterize dynamics.
136 the inclusion of the northern Spanish coast is problematic. It should be removed from the analysis.
217-231 it’s unclear what HAC is being applied to. Is it being applied to 500 subsets varied by some factor? Do the 500 subsets define the monthly time slices? This description needs to be cleaned up.
223 can you indicate why spatial constraining was not used? It seems useful given you are seeking to make spatial patches.
223 define the range of optimal number of groups.
226 the rationale for combining two clustering analyses needs to be described in more detail. Why weren’t the HAC clusters used?
262 I suggest you rethink of the term “Median connectivity static map”. Connectivity typically implies some sort of functional connection which Im not sure applies here.
265 The transition between monthly clusters and median clusters needs to be described. How were the median patches created? Was the median per pixel or across some other units? Also, the term static belies the use of temporal dynamics to produce these maps. Why not label them seascape units, or something similar?
277 I believe you used HAC to determine the optimal number, not k-means
474 remove zone along Spanish coast
513 sentence unclear
534 can you be more specific than strategic considerations? That’s a broad umbrella
536 it’s not clear why pelagic habitats in particular?
539 how does patch characterization identify areas of risk? For example, it’s unclear how patch 1 or patch 10 identifies areas at risk.
Spelling/grammar suggestions:
3 coherent and understandable are redundant
4 description and characterization are redundant
8 main patch occurrence
520 The development process consisted of nine steps
522 fine spatial resolution
526 combine the patch mosaic with MSFD marine sub-regions to compute seascapes
527 a precise set of specifications appeared to be relevant to implement this framework:
529 a hybrid partitioning process has to be computed
534 Seascapes are a tool providing common synthetic environmental information which can enhance knowledge of the
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
