Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Soundscape Ecology in Urban Forest Areas and Its Landscape Spatial Influencing Factors
, Ziru Chen 3, Chen Yan 1, Yukun Zhong 1 and Weicong Fu 1,4,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)
Dear Authors,
I have carefully read the revised version of ms and the responses to my comments. Thank you for your hard work. All my concerns are well answered.
Author Response
According to your comments, the article has been greatly improved, thanks for taking the time to review the article and provide valuable comments.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)
Dear authors,
I have reviewed your manuscript “Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Soundscape ecology in Urban Forest Areas and Its Landscape Spatial Influencing Factors”.
The article is very well written and illustrated. MS falls within the scope of the journal and the subject matter is quite interesting. Statistical analysis of the data was performed accurately and correctly. However, the article can't accept in its present form.
Some comments and suggestions about MS
Abstract
Line 18-39: According to journal (Forests) policy, the abstract should not be more than 200 words and your abstract is about 300 words. So reduce it as per journal requirement.
Line 38-39: Please avoid repeating the same words (like urban forest) that you have already used in the title to enhance the visibility of your article.
Introduction
Line 77: Please replace 'provide' with 'providing'.
Line 81: Please replace 'In order to' with 'To'.
Materials and Methods
Line 111: Please replace 'The data resolution set....' with 'The data resolution is set...'
Line 123: Please replace 'to' with 'at'.
Line 154: Please use 'a' instead of 'A'.
Results
Line 204-207: The caption of figure 5 (a) (b) (c) (d) should be start from 'diurnal' instead of 'Diurnal.
Line 210: Please replace 'With the exception of' with 'Except for'.
Figure 9: Replace caption 'Spatial distribution of natural sound, traffic sound, management sound, and recreational sound' with 'Spatial distribution of natural, traffic, management, and recreational sounds'.
Line 312: The caption of figure 10 (b) should be start with 'spatial' instead of 'Spatial'
Line 342: Please remove full-stop (.) after Table 7
Discussion
Line 370: Please delete 'have a certain'
Overall, discussion is fine.
In light of the above, I think the MS deserves to be published but should only be accepted after a Minor Revision.
Please take into consideration the comments on the PDF file of the revision.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you for your suggestions, we have revised the relevant content, the specific changes are as follows：
Abstract
- Line 18-39: According to journal (Forests) policy, the abstract should not be more than 200 words and your abstract is about 300 words. So reduce it as per journal requirement.
Response 1：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 18-31.
- Line 38-39:Please avoid repeating the same words (like urban forest) that you have already used in the title to enhance the visibility of your article.
Response 2：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 32-33.
Introduction
- Line 77: Please replace 'provide' with 'providing'.
Response 3：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 72.
- Line 81: Please replace 'In order to' with 'To'.
Response 4：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 76.
Materials and Methods
- Line 111: Please replace 'The data resolution set....' with 'The data resolution is set...'
Response 5：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 107.
- Line 123: Please replace 'to' with 'at'.
Response 6：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 120.
- Line 154: Please use 'a' instead of 'A'.
Response 7：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 152.
Results
- Line 204-207: The caption of figure 5 (a) (b) (c) (d) should be start from 'diurnal' instead of 'Diurnal.
Response 8：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 203-206.
- Line 210: Please replace 'With the exception of' with 'Except for'.
Response 9：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 209.
- Figure 9: Replace caption 'Spatial distribution of natural sound, traffic sound, management sound, and recreational sound' with 'Spatial distribution of natural, traffic, management, and recreational sounds'.
Response 10：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to Figure 9.
- Line 312: The caption of figure 10 (b) should be start with 'spatial' instead of 'Spatial'
Response 11：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to Figure 10.
- Line 342: Please remove full-stop (.) after Table 7
Response 12：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 342.
Discussion
- Line 370: Please delete 'have a certain'
Response 13：Thank you so much for this suggestion. We have made modification to the relevant content. Please refer to line 370.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thanks for submitting this study. I found it well written and extensive in detail. I absolutely agree that the spatial component of natural parks is often neglected, both in planning and assessment.
A few general improvements, however, are due before publication:
1. In this study, you recorded the noise levels in a grid of points. This is noise mapping, not soundscape mapping. Soundscape assessments, as reported in ISO 12913, require a perception component and information on the users' expectations. Could you maybe add something on the users? A way to do so could be by adding a better description of how the different areas were planned to be used and how they are used.
2. In terms of indicators, you use loudness and SDI to describe your results. Is this any different from what was expected? Did you actually use Loudness or just dBs? I ask because dBs are now largely perceived to be overrated in predicting perception in quiet areas.
3. Section 3.3.3 only seems to describe what is happening to justify the current usage of the park areas. Could you please clarify what did you learn from the SDI that could not be deducted from the noise levels? If you want: why should we use a "soundscape approach"?
4. Would you please clarify how the 2min sections were selected in each hour? Did you check whether they were representative of the whole hour?
5. You selected "three sunny and breezy days for acoustic data collection". Was there something special happening those days? Were they weekends?
6. I cannot find where Figure 4 is cited in the text. Also, it would benefit from a more thorough explanation of what the reader can see in it. In particular, how did you use the segmentation of the images? This information is probably used in Section 3.4, but not explicitly.
7. How did you label the 52 different sources in the soundscapes (lines 157-170)? Please at least explicit the method, which I suspect is detailed in [2,29-41]
8. Please give us more details on the beautiful Figure 9, which is not even cited in the text. What can be learned from it?
9. In section 3.4, the SDI only depends (in a statistical way) on the proportion of hard ground. Lines 313-332 would benefit from clarifying where you recorded the different positive/negative correlations.
10. In the conclusions, it is claimed that the recorded data can support the improvement of existing soundscapes in forests. Given teh journal, can you add some hints on how this could be achieved?
Reviewer 2 Report
This is a review of forests-1872969, titled: "Temporal and Spatial Characteristics of Soundscape in Urban Forest Areas and Its Landscape Spatial Influencing Factors". The ambiguity of this paper lies in the absence of the definition of "soundscape". Methods employed point to assessments in line with "soundscape ecology", but the wording suggests that it is to improve the "soundscape" as in the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, as defined in ISO 12913-1. The acoustic measurement equipment is inappropriate for soundscape assessment for human perception (see ISO 12913-2), and hence conclusions cannot be drawn in relation to how to improve the park soundscape for human perception. Furthermore, soundscape deals with the perceived dominance of sound sources and not the absolute number of sound types.
Other comments are as follows:
- Soundscape should be defined due to competing definitions between ISO 12913 and soundscape ecology.
- What is a "Zhuanzhu Park"?
- Why is Sony PCM-D100 a "recording pen"?
- It is not clear how the sound types were extracted. Is it by manually listening? Or by an automated method? There are open-sourced toolboxes for such tasks and authors should explain why those are not used: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13960
- Why only SDI is used? See: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13254
- The image segmentation method used has scant details. Why 10:1? Are your images labeled by hand to check for accuracy? Did you do image segmentation on the equirectangular image? Can Deeplab V3+ handle the lens distortion due to the 360 image?
- Deeplab V3+ does not segment water features accurately. Please address this critical issue.
- Why are the equations not properly formatted? This is just lazy writing.
- The abstract and conclusion are almost the same. This is not acceptable.
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Authors,
I have reviewed the paper and found it interesting.
Gneral comments
This paper used a grid method to set monitoring points and showed the spatial-temporal distribution characters of soundscape in a urban park. Landscape characteristics of each monitoring site was digitized by using a panoramic camera and DeeplabV3+ network. There were interesting results about the relationship between soundscape and landscape. The scientific problems of this paper were well raised and responded.
Comments:
English language and style are fine/minor spell check required.
Line 27, it is essential to add the spatial distribution characteristics of nature sound.
Line28, 140km is wrong, and there is another 140km in this paper.L233
Line 83-84, "There are 379 Zhuanzhu Park and over 500 kilome-83 ters of riverside green belts in Fuzhou." I think this phrase is useless here and what is "Zhuanzhu Park" will make readers confused.
Line 85, the area, longitude and latitude of Hot Spring Park should be offered.
Line 87-88 "2,000 trees and 200 plant 87 species being planted here", plant includes trees, is it right: 2,000 tree species and 200 herb species
Line 96-98, first, you mentioned that the feasible distance is 100m, why you took 70m? In this case, two equipments will record same sound sources.
Line110, in the "2.3. Data processing and analysis", you offered the method to get sound types, frequency and time length, PSD, SDI and landscape categories. However, you missed the part of data analysis, such as:did you calculate SDI for each site? you mentioned regression analysis or factor analysis in your results or discussion part, but you did not tell us before why you use it? which software you have used to analyze you data? This part is important and it will tell us how you get your results.
L141, where were the 770 urban park landscape pictures come from? Were they panoramic pictures?
Line154 this chart is not clear
Line159, (Table 1), the style of bracket is not right
Line160, the species of sound sources? is it appropriate to use: the types of sound sources
Line173"3.2.1. Diurnal variation characteristics of sound sources", Figure5 should be well cited in this chapter
Line213, Figure8, if SDI was calculated for each site, the error bars should be offered in Figure8.
L215"3.3.1. Spatial variation characteristics of soundscape composition", Figure9 should be well cited in this chapter
L296-306,R2 and P should be italic.
L302-309, Which method you have used to get these results?
L352-357,Please find another reason to explain the lower power of sound at the nighttime. You mentioned that children play at dusk and prohibit gathering activities only at nighttime. It is unreasonable.
L376, "at noon" is not appropriate, both public and birds would not prefer to play at noon.
L381-386, these two phrases are not tightly connected. In my opinion, they are not necessary.
L400, I think the influence of landscape characters on the PSD and SDI should be disscussed in this chapter.
