Linking Ecosystem Services to Land Use Decisions: Policy Analyses, Multi-Scenarios, and Integrated Modelling

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research scope is very interesting considering the Chinese urbanization culture and the promotive leveraging of ecosystem services in terms of supply for Chinese population.

Congratulations to the authors that produced a very interesting work combining several methods to integrate ES and Land Use efficiency.

Author Response

Thanks for your review and affirmation to our article, we will continue to write more good articles.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 2 Report

Reviewed paper focuses on the linking ecosystem services to land use decisions. Authors selected national key ecological function zones and described the optimalization of ESs as their main goal. They used gray linear planning model, investigated eight land use types and calculated ESV. Also, they developed MLP-CA model.  The case study was conducted in the Puge County with multi-scenario analysis of land use structure. As the result of their studies, they proposed a new perspective for coordination between ESs and land use management.

The paper concerns significant and insufficiently developed in literature issue – applying new technologies to protect environment through proper land use management. Selected topic and empirical analysis can be considered as quite novel and up-to-date. The quality of presentation is high (paper is understandable and easy to read) and the work is complete. The main strength of the paper is the importance of the topic) and well prepared presentation.

The keywords are selected properly and the main body of the article is constructed in a good manner. There are some minor suggestions:

In the introduction Authors could present the aim of the study in more visible way. Author could enrich the final part with the discussion.

Generally, the paper is clear and well organised. The references cited are correct and adequate to reflect other work. Paper also is coherent with aims and scope of the journal. I recommend this paper to be published after minor corrections.

Author Response

Thank you very much for reading our article, pointing out the problem of this article, and giving very valuable comments, and modification suggestions. You have put forward valuable and pertinent comments on the basic data, research methods and contents of this paper, which will play a very important role in improving the quality of our paper, and we cherish it very much!

According to your comments, we have made serious discussion, modification and improvement.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a well written paper that provides a framework for identifying landuse development scenarios that optimize the value of ecosystem services. The methods are fairly complicated, and the authors have done a nice job of providing enough information for a reader to be able to follow their approach.  I have only very minor comments:

Page 2  Line 51 - I think you mean "neural network" not "neutral network"

Page 4, Line 146 - ESVs listed in Table 1.  Please clarify where these values come from.  I believe they are pulled directly from [36-37] in which case please just cite those again so that it is clear.

Page 5, Line 154- "data for building objective function are pulled from statistics yearbooks".  Do you mean the values in Table 1 were pulled from there?  

Figure 5 - I recognize that the individual figure labels are mentioned in a Note, but it would be much easier to interpret if the individual figures could be directly labelled themselves, and with the actual land type not just x1.. x8.

 

Table 1, Table 3, Table 4 - It is a little hard to keep track of what types x1..x8 refer to, and switches back and forth with how they are labelled in the map figures.  It would take up little additional space to add an additional column or header (or even parenthetically such as x1(Forest)) the land type, so that it is easier for the reader to interpret. 

 

Figure 12 - Is there a reason the landtypes aren't in order x1-x8?  I thought they might be ranked from lowest to highest landscape index, but it is not obvious to me.  If not, then why not just order x1-x8?  Again, having the axes labelled "x" but the discussion of the actual types makes this figure a little hard to interpret. 

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Thank you very much for reading our article, pointing out the problem of this article, and giving very valuable comments, and modification suggestions. You have put forward valuable and pertinent comments on the basic data, research methods and contents of this paper, which will play a very important role in improving the quality of our paper, and we cherish it very much!

According to your comments, we have made serious discussion, modification and improvement.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc

Reviewer 4 Report

An article is very interesting. Rapid industrialization and urbanization have negative influence on the ecosystem and environment. Every strategies and solutions resulted from different possible analysis are well welcome. It is true that optimization should be implemented in land use planning and eco system services should be included in it.

Introduction part gives good overview of literature. Authors pointed different land use optimization methods, mainly based on Chinese experiences and justified their own methodology. Methodology is clear described in section 2.  Practical test were done using Puge Country data. Very interested are proposed two scenarios of land use prediction – optimized scenario and trend development scenario. Authors made comparing of their results with Puge County future development plans. Researches proved that development under so called optimized scenario will improve ecosystem service ability in Puge County.

To sum up. Structure of an article is correct – includes: introduction with adequate literature review, description of methods, testing part and analysis of results. Methods are adequately described and results clearly presented. The conclusions are supported by the results of experiments. I recommend to publish that article.

Author Response

Thanks for your review and affirmation to our article, we will continue to write more good articles.

Author Response File: Author Response.doc