Inversion and Effect Research on Dust Distribution of Urban Forests in Beijing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, this manuscript is a well written and interesting. My main objection concern is that some discussion contents are described in results. authors need to clearly separate results and discussions in each part.

Construction model using correlation results need to more improve adding more detail elucidate relevant discussion, according to research objectives that truly benefits the interested reader. 

Additionally, the authors need to include some limitations in this study and suggest future study direction. (For example, to apply the major results from this study in real field, what is necessary?)

Author Response

Thank you very much for your affirmation of this study, nd your comments and suggestions have contributed greatly to improving the quality of our paper.According to your suggestion, we have made some modifications to the paper. The discussion sections included in the results are removed and highlighted in red, and the new sections are highlighted in green, and I used the * trace change * function in Microsoft Word during the modification process, and you can easily see these modifications.

(1) I have carefully studied and revised the main objection concern you have raised, and removed the discussions in results after examining the content of the results step by step.

(2)  More details about model building have been added.

"From the above studies, it is known that the spectral changes in the red band and near-infrared band are most sensitive to dust, and RNDVI and RNDPI have a high correlation with ADA. Therefore, using the images of Sentinel-2 satellite, the NDVI and NDPI of November 22, 2018 and January 14, 2019 were obtained. The ratio of vegetation indexes (RNDVI and RNDPI) in two periods was taken as independent variable, and the ADA of leaves was taken as dependent variable, the regression model of foliar absorbed dust inversion was constructed."

(3) In the discussion section, the limitations of this paper and the direction of future research have been added.

"The results of this study provide urban planners and natural resource managers with some theoretical and practical information on how urban forest vegetation should be planned and managed to better contradict the airborne particulate pollution. Since previous studies have found that the various ecological service functions of green areas was scale dependent, and the dust retention benefits of green areas are also related to scale. However, this study is a preliminary study on dust retention benefits of evergreen vegetation in winter and only one plant had been studied the uncertainty of data caused by downscaling and upscaling has not been studied yet. The effects of planting structure, composition and spatial configuration of vegetation on the dust retention effect will be further quantifiable researched to explore the best pattern of dust retention vegetation in highly urbanized areas, and the dust retention benefits of vegetation will be studied from multiple scales and different seasons."

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I find the paper interesting and scientific sound. It is innovative to calibrate the ground-based narrow-band measurement data on spectral response function into the broad-band spectral reflectance data from the Sentinel-2 satellite.

A sound scientific paper and the methods could be applied to other cities.

Only a few minor English correction is required

(1) In the abstract, first sentence, "absorption" rather than "adsorption"

(2) RNDPI is not defined in the abstract

(3) Line 255:

change "The vehicles cause the dust to be kicked up" to "The vehicles cause the dust to be lifted up"

(4) Line 348: Change "the leer the impact of the dust," to "the lest the impact of the dust,"

Author Response

Thank you very much for your affirmation of this study, and your comments and suggestions have contributed greatly to improving the quality of our paper.According to your suggestion, we have made some modifications to the paper. All the modified parts are highlighted in yellow, so you can easily check them.

(1) In the abstract, first sentence, "adsorption" has been modified to "absorption".

(2) RNDPI has been defined in the abstract，which can be seen in line 23.

(3) "The vehicles cause the dust to be kicked up" has been changed to "The vehicles cause the dust to be lifted up" which can be seen in line 256.

(4)"the leer the impact of the dust" has been changed to "the lest the impact of the dust," which can be seen in line 358.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx