Analysis of a Landscape Intensely Modified by Agriculture in the Tietê–Jacaré Watershed, Brazil

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript is interesting to understand the land use condition of Atlantic Forest and Cerrado in Brazil. And the results of analysis also show the important points.

On the other hand, the analysis and the description in the “Discussion” is not the mention about the land use transition for three years. It is considered as the evaluation / accuracy of the analytical method in this research. So it is considered that there are two ways to revise.

1. If this manuscript is aiming at the evaluation / accuracy of the research methods, title and the abstract should be revised.
2. If this manuscript is aiming at the discussion of the landscape change of target area, the part of “Discussion” should be revised.

Please consider about this point again.

 

L221: “showed” => “shows”

L327: “grow” => “growth”

L520: “develop” => “development”

L727-728: I can’t find this reference in the text.

Figure 2: Mention inside the column of upper right “Dynamics of use and landcover” => “Dynamics of land use and landcover”

Figure 6: “Orange” => “Citriculture”

Figure 8: There is no legends.

The shape of focused area is different between three focused maps and main map.

L520: “develop” => “development”

L727-728: I can’t find this reference in the text.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we would like to thank you for all your considerations. We reviewed our paper in its totality considering all the recommendations and to help, we highlight in red color all the modifications. As recommended for the Journal, we also inserted the shapefiles/database to be available for the readers and supplementary materials. We hope to present a complete text in this revision.

We attached a file discussion of all the comments from reviewers. 

Best regards

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I found the manuscript " Analysis of a landscape intensely modified by agriculture in the Tiete-Jacaré Watershed, Brazil" by Trevisan et al. well written, clearly structured and based on sound scientific methods. The paper focuses on the intense expansion of agricultural area in the SE of Brazil analyzing a watershed of almost 1.2 million ha occurred between 2016 and 2018 a the expense of natural vegetation and pastures and discusses the land use classification accuracy obtained by random forest algorithms applied to high resolution satellite (Sentinel 2) images, in contrast with a previous classification based on lower resolution (Landsat) imagery. The topic is certainly of great interest for the readers of Sustainability and the presented methodology has the merit of being scalable to other regions of the world, improving the accuracy and detection efficiency of ongoing land cover changes involving natural landscapes, as the authors point out in their conclusions. Overall an enjoyable paper and a valuable scholarly contribution.

I found a few typos and grammar mistakes that need to be corrected:

L72 - delete "been"

Figure 4 - In the upper mid text box "Data preparation for deforestation detection" and not "deflorestation".

Par 2.2.3:

the paragraph from L 266 to L272 is repeated from L 274 to L 280. The latter paragraph however includes more literature references. Considering that the most suitable position for the text is from L266, I suggest including all the references there and  deleting the replicated paragraph after L 274.

L 407 - "..when compared with the land use and land cover from the Landsat images for 2017 (30 min of spatial resolution) did manually for Trevisan et al., (2020)."

The meaning of the sentence evidenced  in bold characters is unclear. Please rewrite it. 

L492 - replace "and thus can reproduce" with "which can thus reproduce"

L520-521 - please change accordingly:

"Also, the develop further development and application of machine learning"

 "..the speed and accuracy in the detection of the deforestation and the impacts of land use and land cover changes..

Fig.15 (caption) - "transition between pasture and forestry"

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we would like to thank you for all your considerations. We reviewed our paper in its totality considering all the recommendations and to help, we highlight in red color all the modifications. As recommended for the Journal, we also inserted the shapefiles/database to be available for the readers and supplementary materials. We hope to present a complete text in this revision.

We attached a file discussion of all the comments from reviewers. 

Best regards

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Line 37: Please explain what are in the Brazilian Forest Code that contributes to intensifying Brazil’s landscape.

Line 52: Explain what are some of the anthropic activities.

Line 52: What are diverse pressures on natural systems?

Line 57: It would be nice to see why planning and decision-making are needed before explaining what they are based on.

Line 59: Provide citations.

In the paragraph starting line 71, it would be good to see some references on the use of GIS in identifying Land Use and the landscape configuration. For example

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1749-8198.2009.00245.x?casa_token=1h-TxBM94oYAAAAA%3AoR6OWY3ZDwFQc7ADQE2ff4lN7eWoaxQilTnOd8UwP7YHVy7j0c4Mq49EqGeo1RXQGWlJwzB37cQIfkg

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837719302583

https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=dXJGAQAAIAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA1&ots=RC2NF2Yodq&sig=ih0Gp0pZgfeNYEMbOOoT0JEDMnw#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Line 78: Check citation formatting

Line 84: It is not clear about “For this purpose”: Is this referring to this manuscript or Menezes, Salgado (2018)?

I think it would be nice to see Sentinels’ description in materials and methods instead of in an introduction section. Here it would be nice to see how other researchers has used this data source.

Line 110: why some words are in red color?

 

Figure 1: I would suggest using a different colors for the Urban area as it is not distinct from the background color.

Figure 2: “Dynamics of use and land cover. Is Land missing in front of use?

I really like the way methods are described. They are clear and concise.

Line 269 and line 277 are telling the same thing.

Figure 5: I think it would be effective to use a contrast color for vegetation and sugarcane.

I would suggest explaining accuracy assessment results before actual results of land use land cover change.

Line 400:  Conversion of forestlands to other specifically agricultural are well studied. Just doing some quick research I found few papers such as https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837719302583

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264837713001683?casa_token=QhfAWW_AfdEAAAAA:NfY1lbQ5WF5p59AW7oJez5DCFq9YK8_A4yexj8F4z7l13uNpdVqHJrOaOlfjXYd-aTJK4-OYOg

 

It would be nice to see some in-depth discussion about the policy implications of the study instead of methodological discussions. Also, it would be nice to see why there was some confusion between different land use land cover classes.

Overall the paper is well written and is policy-relevant.

 

 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we would like to thank you for all your considerations. We reviewed our paper in its totality considering all the recommendations and to help, we highlight in red color all the modifications. As recommended for the Journal, we also inserted the shapefiles/database to be available for the readers and supplementary materials. We hope to present a complete text in this revision.

We attached a file discussion of all the comments from reviewers. 

Best regards

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf