The Enhanced Management of Water Resources Improves Ecosystem Services in a Typical Arid Basin

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I think the authors presented a detailed comprehensive methodology, Results, discussion, and conclusion parts. My major comments and questions are as follows:

• You used multiple datasets with different sources (meteorological/land surface data) with different temporal resolutions. How do you merge all those datasets into a common time series, please explain? It is necessary to report how the matching is carried out. I suggest adding a table that will include information about the resolution(temporal/spatial), sources, data ranges, etc.
• The research motivation is not completely highlighted in the introduction. It should be obviously pointed out.
• What is the practical significance of land use/cover, area of land use/cover (B)? Is it general in other existing papers? This should also be highlighted more in the introduction.
• The contributions should be elaborately described. More comparisons should be made with other literature.
• In the case study, the analysis should be in a descriptive way, where the selection and analysis on the related parameters and data should be added.
• The author should compare the proposed methodology with more latest studies in the discussion section.
• Can you introduce the Kling-Gupta Efficiency (KGE) metric which provides three distinct components representing the correlation, the bias, and a measure of relative variability in the simulated and observed values to quantify the trade-off between two or more ES?  See details in Ehsan et al. 2019

Ehsan Bhuiyan MA, Nikolopoulos EI, Anagnostou EN. Machine Learning–Based Blending of Satellite and Reanalysis Precipitation Datasets: A Multiregional Tropical Complex Terrain Evaluation. Journal of Hydrometeorology. 2019 Nov;20(11):2147-61.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper by Jing Guo et al. entitled "Enhanced management of water resources improves ecosystem services in a typical arid basin" is an interesting study on ecosystem services. The authors examined the optimization of water resources management based on the trade-offs of ecosystem services in the Tarim River basin, China. They investigated the distribution of four ecosystem services. They found that land-use change affects CAS and water volume change ET, TVDI, and GWD. They reported that unified water resource management has improved ES. They also analyzed the trade-off/synergy relationships of four ES. In conclusion, they suggested different ecological water regulation and control measures. In general, this is a well-written paper that shows interesting data. It will be of interest to readers of this journal, particularly researchers and engineers involved in this field.

I have the following minor concerns.

1) P.1 L.20 etc. The authors should check the technical terms. For example, "soil moisture" should be revised to "soil moisture drought index." Additionally, "groundwater" should be revised to "groundwater depth."

2) P.4 L.156 The research region section is not well organized. I think that it would be better to move this section to data and methods section.

3) P.4 L.157 Regrettably, Figure 1 lacks Hetian River, Kashi River, and Qarqan River, which are represented in this paragraph. They should be clearly described in Figure 1.

4) P.5 L.204 In Figure 2 "RS," the abbreviation of "remote sensing" should be spelled out.

5) P.5 L.205 In this paper "CAS" means not "carbon sequestration" but "carbon storage." "Carbon sequestration" should be revised to "carbon storage."

6) P.5 L.208 "TM," the abbreviation of "Thematic Mapper" should be spelled out. "OLI," the abbreviation of "Operational Land Imager" should be spelled out.

7) P.7 L.261 There is a typographical error. "WWC" should be revised to "WWF."

8) P.8 L.297-298 There are two typographical errors. Table S1 and Fig. S1 should be corrected.

9) P.8 L.307 There is a typographical error. "Pearson, two-tailed" should be corrected.

10) P.10 L.373 etc. decimal point is not necessary to describe the amount of rainfall. For example, 109.44 mm should be revised to 109 mm. 

11) P.16 L.473 In Figure 8 the axis label should be additionally described.

12) P.16 L.488 "and" should be added between "accumulation," and "biogeochemical."

13) P.20 L.663 "Author Contributions" and "Funding" should be described.

14) P.20 L.665 "," is necessary between ")" and "and."

15) P.20 L.667 "Conflict of Interest" should be described.

16) There are some errors in the References section. P.20 L.672 "Synthesis" should be revised to "Health Synthesis." P.21 L.711 "10634" should be corrected to "106345." P.22 L.740 "2012" should be revised to "2013." P.22 L.770 "Li, X." should be added in the authors.      

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The revised manuscript significantly improved and scientifically will contribute to the research community. Here are minor changes that will complete the manuscript.  

1. Line 46-48, line 214-217: Can you reformulate the sentences
2. Line 50-52, Line 57, line 182-185: please provide more citations
3. Line 193-194: Can you reformulate “And the water permeability and 194 richness of the aquifer are uniformly distributed with little change [59]”.
4. Can you improve Figure 2. title
5. line 250: can you add few sentences about manual interpretation method
6. It would be great if you add more citations which are also related where they showed soil moisture are very important in variables in water resource studies. You can present line such as:  Line 107: “Thus, soil moisture and ET are also scarce 107 regulating services in arid areas [13,31, Bhuiyan et al 2018; Seyyedi et al., 2014].”

 

Bhuiyan et al 2018: A nonparametric statistical technique for combining global precipitation datasets: development and hydrological evaluation over the Iberian Peninsula, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci., 22, 1371–1389, https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-22-1371-2018, 2018.

Seyyedi et al., 2014: Incorporating surface soil moisture information in error modeling of TRMM passive Microwave rainfall, IEEE T. Geosci. Remote, 52, 6226–6240, 2014. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx