Assessment of the Urban Expansion and Its Impact on the Eco-Environment—A Case Study of Hefei Municipal Area

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article has been improved. Thank you for your efforts. There are still a few minor issues that need to be addressed. 

1- Figure 1 has a key legend written in a language other than English, which requires translation. 

2- The explanation of the result presented in Figure 3 is unclear; the further description is required in the text.

3. There is no need for subtitles 5.1 and 5.2. The authors can keep the text and remove subtitles.  

4. There is no discussion of the limitation/s in the discussion section. It would be helpful to include a few sentences regarding the research limitations associated with sensing image maps. In the "Conclusion and Outlook," the limitations should be linked to the future outlook proposed in the last paragraph.

5. The discussion section should also relate the present results to other studies in the same field of study. This deductive argument is very crucial. I would suggest the following articles that might be helpful in linking your results to their results. 

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14137922

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14137766

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14031699

6. The references should be revised; for example, reference numbers 18 and 28 have semicolons between the authors' names, which is not in accordance with the referencing style used in MDPI journals.  

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

On behalf of my co-authors, we thank you for giving us a chance to revise and improve the quality of our manuscript entitled " Assessment of the Urban Expansion and Its Impact on the Eco-Environment——A Case Study of Hefei Municipal Area" (ID: 1679442),your review of our paper has been a tremendous help in improving our paper, and we appreciate it very much.

We have read your comments carefully and have revised the model in our paper. We have done our best to revise our manuscript in light of your comments, and we have written a point-by-point response for you, the details of which you can see in this letter. To make the response more obvious, Q represents the questions asked by the reviewer and A is our answer to those questions. All in all, we found the comments to be very useful. In particular, we would like to thank you again for your comments.

 

Q1.Figure 1 has a key legend written in a language other than English, which requires translation. 

A1.The legend has been modified to English.

 

Q2.The explanation of the result presented in Figure 3 is unclear; the further description is required in the text.

A2.Section 3.2.1 has been rewritten to further clarify the changing trend of expansion coefficient and expansion rate.

 

Q3.There is no need for subtitles 5.1 and 5.2. The authors can keep the text and remove subtitles.  

A3.Both titles have been removed.

 

Q4.There is no discussion of the limitation/s in the discussion section. It would be helpful to include a few sentences regarding the research limitations associated with sensing image maps. In the "Conclusion and Outlook," the limitations should be linked to the future outlook proposed in the last paragraph.

A4.The issue of insufficient resolution of remote sensing images has been discussed and discussed in chapters 4.3 and 5.

 

Q5.The discussion section should also relate the present results to other studies in the same field of study. This deductive argument is very crucial. I would suggest the following articles that might be helpful in linking your results to their results. 

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14137922

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14137766

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14031699

A5.In Section 4.2, discuss the paper with some papers you find yourself.

 

Q6.The references should be revised; for example, reference numbers 18 and 28 have semicolons between the authors' names, which is not in accordance with the referencing style used in MDPI journals.  

A6.The format study of the reference literature was modified as in the template. In the first picture is the reference style in the template, and the second picture is the style I modified.

 

 

Thanks again for your advice which makes the article perfect. I wish this revision will be acceptable for publication in Sustainability.

Yours Sincerely,

Xiamei Yao Dr.

Email: [email protected]

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This article seems to be a revised one, and the quality of the paper has been improved from the color change, but I think the following revisions should be made before it is published:

 1 Are there certain standards for developed and developing cities? It is suggested to supplement detailed quantitative indicators on developing and developed cities to strengthen the scientific nature of the paper.

 2 Line66: It seems that the word, work,  is redundant.

 3 Line 340: natural splitting method, I think it should be the natural break method or natural breakpoint method

 4 Section4.1

A recent interesting and similar study also explores the relationship between urban expansion and the ecological environment. It is recommended to introduce the differences and connections of the studies in this section.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2022.104055,

 5 Figure 4 should be placed after the next paragraph. Similar question, also Figure 2.

 6 In Figure 5b, the annotation covers the axes.

 7 Line485-486 Too many repeated words, it is suggested to modify. Even the expression of this paragraph is a bit redundant.

 8 There are problems with the references of the papers. The titles and journal names of some papers may be inconsistent with the original, such as Ref32 and Ref33. It is recommended that the articles should use the l English literature for better promotion to international readers.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

On behalf of my co-authors, we thank you for giving us a chance to revise and improve the quality of our manuscript entitled " Assessment of the Urban Expansion and Its Impact on the Eco-Environment——A Case Study of Hefei Municipal Area" (ID: 1679442),your review of our paper has been a tremendous help in improving our paper, and we appreciate it very much.

We have read your comments carefully and have revised the model in our paper. We have done our best to revise our manuscript in light of your comments, and we have written a point-by-point response for you, the details of which you can see in this letter. To make the response more obvious, Q represents the questions asked by the reviewer and A is our answer to those questions. All in all, we found the comments to be very useful. In particular, we would like to thank you again for your comments.

 

Q1.Are there certain standards for developed and developing cities? It is suggested to supplement detailed quantitative indicators on developing and developed cities to strengthen the scientific nature of the paper.

A1.The developing cities and developed cities mentioned in the article are relative concepts, and the developing cities are mainly cities that are still in rapid development. In this regard, the article is to compare the gap between Hefei and developed cities to determine that Hefei is in rapid development.

 

Q2. Line66: It seems that the word, work, is redundant.

A2.The word work has been removed.

 

Q3. Line 340: natural splitting method, I think it should be the natural break method or natural breakpoint method

A3.It has been modified to a natural breakpoint method.

 

Q4. Section4.1

A recent interesting and similar study also explores the relationship between urban expansion and the ecological environment. It is recommended to introduce the differences and connections of the studies in this section.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2022.104055,

A4.This article focuses on evaluating the morphology and functional polycentric structure of megacities in the process of urbanization, while our paper focuses on exploring the changes in the ecological environment of cities in the process of urbanization. The relevant exposition and discussion are placed in chapter 4.1.

 

Q5.Figure 4 should be placed after the next paragraph. Similar question, also Figure 2.

A5.The position of the diagram has been adjusted.

 

Q6.In Figure 5b, the annotation covers the axes.

A6.A modification has been made to Figure 5(b).

 

Q7. Line485-486 Too many repeated words, it is suggested to modify. Even the expression of this paragraph is a bit redundant.

A7.The section has been removed and a new discussion has been added.

 

Q8. There are problems with the references of the papers. The titles and journal names of some papers may be inconsistent with the original, such as Ref32 and Ref33. It is recommended that the articles should use the l English literature for better promotion to international readers.

A8.More international journals were used in the references in.

 

Thanks again for your advice which makes the article perfect. I wish this revision will be acceptable for publication in Sustainability.

Yours Sincerely,

Xiamei Yao Dr.

Email: [email protected]

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

1, as mentioned, urban expansion has great impacts on regional environment. However, this is a common knowledge. Why to study this topic and what innovation of this study will present should be stated clearly but cannot be found in Abstract.

2, the introduction is very poorly written due to a mess of logic organization, lacking a clear knowledge gap and a main innovation of this study. For example, since parts of mentioned previous methods have limitations, why this study authors still adopted those methods and combined them into experiment design and without any explanation?

3, since authors believe the result of this study will benefit for developing countries and cities, why in previous part of the Introduction authors only mentioned China but not referred or pointed out cases of other developing countries especially from non-Asian countries?

4, since Hefei is selected as the study case of rapidly urbanizing cities, data of its urbanizing rate of each year or its changing curve drawn based on those data should be provided previously. Then, based on the curve, a rapidly urbanizing period will be found out which is the main reason for selecting the year of 1984 as the starting span of this study. However, this is missing.

5, it is totally acceptable to select following years as 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2020. However, it is not as typical as normal. Usually, researchers prefer the years of 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. It would be better to explain reasons of doing so.

6, a location map is needed before Figure 1.

7, it is an avoidable error to mark legends in Chinese.

8, although here has no strict regulations on land use types’ color; however, it is better to follow commonly accepted tradition. Furthermore, it is necessary to check the accuracy and replace current background colors of these eight sub-maps of Figure 1. For example, it seems that too much unused land which is marked in light yellow can be found in the sub-map of 2009. Actually, it is impossible in real.

9, it is unsuitable to use stable ecosystem service value coefficients to each land use type for a time span about 35 years, seeing section 2.4.1. 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

On behalf of my co-authors, we thank you for giving us a chance to revise and improve the quality of our manuscript entitled " Assessment of the Urban Expansion and Its Impact on the Eco-Environment——A Case Study of Hefei Municipal Area" (ID: 1679442),your review of our paper has been a tremendous help in improving our paper, and we appreciate it very much.

We have read your comments carefully and have revised the model in our paper. We have done our best to revise our manuscript in light of your comments, and we have written a point-by-point response for you, the details of which you can see in this letter. To make the response more obvious, Q represents the questions asked by the reviewer and A is our answer to those questions. All in all, we found the comments to be very useful. In particular, we would like to thank you again for your comments.

 

Q1.As mentioned, urban expansion has great impacts on regional environment. However, this is a common knowledge. Why to study this topic and what innovation of this study will present should be stated clearly but cannot be found in Abstract.

A1.For why the impact of urbanization on regional environment is studied, it is presented in the last paragraph of the abstract. For the innovation of the article, it is mainly to combine as well as deepen the commonly used ecological and environmental evaluation methods, and at the same time to study the cities that are currently in rapid development, rather than those that are already more well developed.

 

Q2. The introduction is very poorly written due to a mess of logic organization, lacking a clear knowledge gap and a main innovation of this study. For example, since parts of mentioned previous methods have limitations, why this study authors still adopted those methods and combined them into experiment design and without any explanation?

A2.The article mentions that the previous scholars' research methods are only based on one aspect and are not bad, while this study establishes an evaluation system based on them with the help of entropy method, which is a deepening as well as a union of the previous studies.

 

Q3.Since authors believe the result of this study will benefit for developing countries and cities, why in previous part of the Introduction authors only mentioned China but not referred or pointed out cases of other developing countries especially from non-Asian countries?

A3.Some other developing countries as well as cities have been re-added to the introduction, and research progress on these regions has been added.

 

Q4.Since Hefei is selected as the study case of rapidly urbanizing cities, data of its urbanizing rate of each year or its changing curve drawn based on those data should be provided previously. Then, based on the curve, a rapidly urbanizing period will be found out which is the main reason for selecting the year of 1984 as the starting span of this study. However, this is missing.

A4.According to your suggestion, I added the journal of the change of urbanization rate of Hefei city at chapter 4.3, because chapter 2.1 already has the district map, so it is not appropriate to place the map of urbanization rate again, so I adjusted it to chapter 4.3. The year 1984 was chosen because Lansat TM series, the earliest remote sensing image that could only be found in Hefei City in 1984 and could be used, so this one year was chosen to start.

 

Q5. It is totally acceptable to select following years as 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999, 2004, 2009, 2014 and 2020. However, it is not as typical as normal. Usually, researchers prefer the years of 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. It would be better to explain reasons of doing so.

A5.1984 is chosen because the earliest remote sensing image of tm series can only be found in 1984, and each year after that is five years apart, and the last year is chosen to be 2020 for the novelty of the study.

 

Q6.A location map is needed before Figure 1.

A6.According to your suggestion, a district map of Hefei city has been added in section 2.1.

 

Q7. It is an avoidable error to mark legends in Chinese.

A7.Thank you for your reminder, it has been modified.

 

Q8. Although here has no strict regulations on land use types’ color; however, it is better to follow commonly accepted tradition. Furthermore, it is necessary to check the accuracy and replace current background colors of these eight sub-maps of Figure 1. For example, it seems that too much unused land which is marked in light yellow can be found in the sub-map of 2009. Actually, it is impossible in real.

A8.This is a mistake I made when I changed the color of the map, the light yellow land is actually cultivated land, it is my labeling error, it has been revised to the correct legend. 

Q9.It is unsuitable to use stable ecosystem service value coefficients to each land use type for a time span about 35 years, seeing section 2.4.1. 

A9.The value coefficient of ecosystem services is based on the equivalence table of ecosystem services per unit area of terrestrial ecosystems, while the value coefficient of farmland-food production is used to calculate the value coefficient of arable land under the food production function, while the price of food is not uniform over the years, sometimes high and sometimes low, and the value coefficient of ecosystem services is used to assess the capacity of ecosystem services. If the current year's value of ecosystem services is used for calculation, it will lead to the following situation: even though the ecosystem service capacity is decreasing, the calculated value is increasing, which is not good for observation and research.

Many other scholars also use this calculation method. For example, the following papers.

[1] Rahman Md. Mostafizur, Szabó György. Impact of Land Use and Land Cover Changes on Urban Ecosystem Service Value in Dhaka, Bangladesh [J]. Land, 2021,10(8).DOI: 10.3390/LAND10080793.

 

Thanks again for your advice which makes the article perfect. I wish this revision will be acceptable for publication in Sustainability.

Yours Sincerely,

Xiamei Yao Dr.

Email: [email protected]

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

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

Dear author,

Under the background of rapid urbanization, ecological environment has undergone a series of changes.Based on the method of remote sensing and GIS, your paper analyzes the process of urban expansion in Hefei, China by using multiple indexes, which has certain practical significance for understanding the change of ecological environment quality.Your paper has some practical significance.

1.The structure must be adjusted.It is suggested that a section on "conclusions" be added to fully reflect the innovative insights gained in this study.

2.The theoretical value and systematic evaluation of ecological and environmental effects of urban expansion need to be strengthened. Your paper is not able to systematically elaborate the theoretical basis, realistic value and scientific method of this research. It is suggested that further scientific and reasonable and comprehensive evaluation should be carried out for the ecological environment problems existing in the research area.

3.The "discussion" doesn't go far enough. Your paper only lists the change of urban land use in Hefei from 1984 to 2020, and analyzes the change rate in different periods, which is necessary, but fails to discuss the key scientific issues. Suggested that application of the principle of method of physical  geography and landscape ecology, urban management and regional geography, analyzes the driving forces of the urban expansion and focuses on analyzing the policy orientation,population flow,industrial structure, traffic pattern and regional natural geographical elements with human elements such as the coupling between the ecological environment of urban expansion and its environmental effects.On this basis, it is suggested to expound the relationship between the objectivity of regional development and the advantages and disadvantages of urban expansion, and further elaborate the close relationship between urban structure, function, dynamic change and internal driving factors of development.

4.The characteristics of the eight time-phase remote sensing information sources used in your paper need to be introduced, and their spatial resolution, spectral resolution and accuracy of monitoring data of urban land use types in Hefei need to be analyzed.

5.P7 Line 227 Table 4 Criteria for Eco-environmental Quality Assessment, the theoretical basis and practical reliability of EI index classification cannot be analyzed and demonstrated.

6.Some expressions need to be precise in your paper.(1) P2 line 49, it is recommended that "Son[5], Wei[6] and Yanjie[7], et al" not be placed at the beginning of a sentence.(2) P3 Line 96 "8 Remote Sensing Images" is not clearly expressed. (3) The color brightness in Figure 1 needs to be further enhanced. (4)Figure and Table captions are not followed by a period (.) , please check one by one.(5) P4 line 126," The Punctuation "。"should be changed to ".".(6) In P7 line 227, there is a mixture of Chinese and English characters in the names in Table 4.(7) P12, in Fig. 5 (c), the lower corner of the chemical name of the substance must be regulated. (8) In Table 6, the unit of ecological service value (RMB), is best expressed in US dollars. (9) P6 Line 215-216 "Ministry of water resources" is not clearly translated or has an unreasonable proper name. Should the first letter be capitalized? (10) P15 line 474 "681 km²," there seems to be too much space between the number and dimension, please check. (11) Please verify and standardize the reference format one by one, such as punctuation, case, page number and other problems.

7.There are many problems in academic expression, language logic and format standard.It is suggested that language expression requires the guidance of native language peer correction.

8.Your paper is a local research in China, and focuses on urbanization and ecological environment issues. Its representativeness and typicality cannot fully reflect sustainable development issues in a more global sense, and the research methods and results are bland and have certain limitations. It is suggested that local research journals can be used.

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors! In this article, a very interesting topic is discussed with a reflection on Hefei Municipal in China. A better version of this manuscript will require some careful attention.

1- The abstract needs to be rewritten by summarizing the main findings; here, I can see many details in the three concluded results. Summarizing these three findings is much appreciated for readability. The details are in the entire section of the results. The research design, questions, hypotheses and methods need to be clearly stated in this section. 

 

2- The introduction needs further enhancement for the writing style. I see lots of long sentences separated by comms. I would recommend double-checking the whole text with an expert in the English language. This issue is essential for non-native speakers. 

 

3. The introduction must be restructured. The introduction section should describe the gap in the literature and provide references to support it, if necessary. Furthermore, the research problem is very generic; it is appropriate to begin with challenges associated with urbanization in China, followed by a discussion of the purpose and methods that can address the purpose. There is, however, a focus on the challenges of the case study that is presented at the end of the introduction. There should also be a brief description of the research methodology in the introduction. In addition, the introduction should describe the novelty or importance of the research. The purpose of the research is not clear. It is unclear what the author means by 'urban space expansion'. Is it a term? In that case, it should be clarified in the text in the first instance.   

 

4- The 'materials and methods' have been well written. 

I recommend that you revise the Discussion and Outlook section in the subsection 'Discussion.' It would be better to rewrite it as paragraphs rather than bullet points (1, 2, 3, etc.). You should also link your results to the results of others who also used similar environmental analyses. Here, I recommend reviewing the results of these articles, which are somewhat similar to yours. 

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14031699

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13179617

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2019.101442 

https://doi.org/10.3390/su14116619  

https://doi.org/10.1108/IJBPA-07-2018-0055

 

It would be helpful if you would link your findings to sustainability. These links may provide helpful hypotheses for implementation. 

7- The authors have offered a recommendation for future research. However, I would recommend that future research suggestions should be based on research limitations that need to be added to the section entitled "Outlook" in your manuscript.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper tried to use many perspectives and indictors to comprehensively illustrate changes in the environment for a rapidly urbanizing area but it failed. I strongly do NOT recommend authors explore this important question based on a so-called ‘comprehensive’ framework but have a superficial assessment of each topic. Besides, most of the selected environmental indicators would directly or indirectly decrease with the built-up area increasing and natural land decreasing, resulting in an inevitable outcome——ecological deterioration. Beyond methods, I suggest authors need to think carefully about the logical flow, key findings, arrangement of results and discussion, and significance of this study in the first round of revision, and then revise detailed problems and polish the language in the second round.

 

Suggestions for each section:

Title: It is wired to use ‘ecological environment’ because it is Chinglish.

 

The introduction cannot justify this study well. Authors merely listed many studies with well-known tools and simple methods’ illustrations. Meanwhile, they do not clearly illustrate their scientific contributions.

 

In the method section, authors created a so-called ‘comprehensive’ framework but have a superficial assessment of each topic. I am not understanding why they chose these topics and what are relationships among them. For each topic, e.g., ES, it is doubtable for valuing ES based on land use types directly. Besides, I am not understanding why they could give a value of resilience based on each LUCC type.

 

The discussion section is not insightful because they merely repeat the results and then give 1 to 2 sentences to illustrate why or its impacts.