An Assessment of the Effects of Food Districts on Sustainable Management of Land: The Case of Lombardia, Italy

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 The manuscript is well written

Author Response

Thank you very much for your review. The paper hase been improved according to the comments of all the reviewers. In paeticular, we tried to enhance the innovative approach and the originailty of our analysis both in the introduction and in the conclusions. 

Reviewer 2 Report

The submitted paper is well processed. The topic of the paper is interesting, however the importance of the topic is not explained enough in deep. On the other hand, the problem under the investigation is specified, relevant literature overview is provided and the objectives are also relevant and rational. The proposed methodology is simple one, but acceptable and also rational one. The results part of the paper is interesting and provided discussion meets basic requirements and it is also rational one. The final conclusion of the paper is well specified. The strong and weak aspects of the paper are discussed. Also relevant limitation part is provided. The specification of relevant stakeholders possible interested in paper's  results is also defined. The paper is suitable for publishing in its current form. 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your review. In the new version of the paper we tried to explain better and more in details the importance of the topic and the originality of the approach and the results produced, following comments and suggestions from all the reviewers.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors presented an approach to assess the impact of food districts on sustainable land management in Italy. The manuscript is well structured and the study was carried out with adequate scientific methodologies.

Some suggestions I advise the authors to consider during revising this paper:

1. The aim of the paper should be clearly indicated in the Introduction.

2. One paragraph should be added to the end of the introduction section, clarifying the structure of the paper.

3. A table summarizing existing approaches to improve the sustainability of agricultural systems should be added to Section 2. It would be a good complement to the short literature review in Section 2.

4. Please increase the font size in Figure 1.

5. It is necessary to justify the choice of six LDI indices. Can other indexes be used? Please explain this to readers.

6. I suggest clarifying the software tool for implementing the developed approach.

7. The scientific novelty of research requires a clearer understanding. The authors need to highlight the contribution of the paper.

 

Best regards

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for your review and your very useful comments. We took in consideration all of them and reviewed our manusctips accordingly. We believe this version rather improves the quality of the paper and enhances the methodological work and the results.

1. We tried to clarify better in the introduction the objective of the paper and the main results.
2. We added a paragraph at the end of the introduction to present shortly the structure of the paper.
3. We added a table in the section on the literature review in which different territorial approaches aimed at improving the sustainability of agricultural systems are briefly presented, with some literature added on this matter, reported in the final bibliography.
4. We increased the size of fig. 1. 
5. We tried to explain the choice of the indexes used, which are the most commonly used in the literature and are compatible with the sub-regional scale of the analysis and with their availability in time. This was also highlighted in the introduction of the paper.
6.  We indicated the softwares used for the data analysis (please see para. 3.2, r. 289-291 and para, 3.4, r. 440-441.
7. We tried to stress better in the introduction and in the conclusions also the novelty of our approach and the value added by the assessment of the "value added" of the district form of organization in land use and sustainability. 

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors considered all the reviewers’ suggestions and answered the questions raised.

The manuscript has been improved and can be published in the Systems.

 

Best regards