Data on the Land Cover Transition, Subsequent Landscape Degradation, and Improvement in Semi-Arid Rainfed Agricultural Land in North–West Tunisia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please check that you remove text which is there to guide authors during paper writing.

The identification of the dataset throughout the paper needs improving, different expressions are used : in the intro, in the text and data repository, in the section numbering. For example Land cover degradation is somestimes called Dynamic land cover data. 

The introduction could be improved 1) to be more informative about what is the "good practices" and how formal they are. It is unclear if the matrix is a direct reformulation of the document or not. 2) to mention explicitely that different metrics are used for ecological assessment in the litterature but there is a lack of unified view. It seems the gathering of metrics and how to interpret also is a contribution.

The source data are well described but the motivation to use them should be grouped with the description (see parag2 of section 3 where authors argue why they use Sentinel-2).

The description of produced data can be improved : 1) you may want to remove the too many details on provenance which are redundant with the method described afterward 2) the list of metrics and how to interpret them rather belongs to the description of the dataset (here it is at the end of the paper). 

Figure1 : the focal area boundaries as well as their names are not legible

The description of the method needs improvement. It is distributed in different sections of the paper (at the end of the introduction, within the presentation of datasets and then the section "method"). The workflow figure is very useful. The Tools "Land cover change matrix" could get a more informative name to express the matrix interpret change into degradation or improvement. More generally it is not enough to tell the name of a tool it is useful also to express what it is doing with the data.  

The quality control is applied to source data and not to produced dataset. This may need some explanations or consideration for future work. In particular to face local expertise with produced data on Land Cover Degradation.  

It would be relevant to include some feedback on the methodology used and the applicability of the tools you used.

The section User Notes is too draft. As it is optional you may want either to remove it or to detail more the first usages. It would be a good way to give some conclusions on the value of your data.

The details of authors contributions is described correctly in the data repository but not in the paper.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

There are lots of grammar and syntactic errors, and i am not a native english speaker.  

Author Response

"Please see the attachment." 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript provided background of the study, detailed introduction of 3 datasets, and the data collection as well as analysis methods clearly. There are some minor suggestions which the author might consider.

 The accuracy assessment was taken for the Esri’s land cover data of the study region. One hundred sample points were selected for each class. Due to the obvious area difference of each class, it is necessary to announce how were the points distributed in the study area. The distribution maps might show the density of sampling.

 Although the full words were given for the abbreviations, they were not annotated at the time of first occurrence, such as LC in Line 22, LP and MePA in Table 8.

Author Response

"Please see the attachment." 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf