Spatial Distribution of Development Types of Forestry-Ecological-Culture Industries in Chinese Provinces

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

Something is wrong with the 120-131 lines.

 

Author Response

Thanks for the correction, and it has been modified accordingly.Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

this study is written well, however need some revisions, in abstract the author divide the industry into four types from vey high to very low, what was the base of this division? What are the practical application of your results/findings on society mention those in introduction. Diagram needs to be improved.

interpretation of cluster analysis some values from point 13 are missing mention the reason clearly. Conclusions can be improved by added results

Author Response

1.Thanks for the correction and further improving and revising the whole English grammar and rhetoric. 

2.Add the base of this division in the abstract—“according to the principal component score”.(L23)

Add the practical application in the abstract—“The findings of this study provide theory-based guidance and policy suggestions for improving the efficiency of industrial development and optimizing spatial distribution of diversified industrial development.”(L28-30)

3.Article 3.1 Explain that the cumulative contribution rate is more than 85% of the main component.

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

General remarks of the reviewer

1.   Chapter "Introduction"

-    The text and the statements contained therein from paragraph 1 (lines 30-57) require literature on the presented theses. Without specifying the literature, these are general statements and in such a case the text should be removed.

-    The sentence (lines 84-85) is not true in the context of world literature, it can only refer to research from China.

-    The text from paragraph 3 (lines 84-101) needs to be supplemented with literature on the research on the evaluation of forestry industry from other countries. Only literature from China is listed.

-    The text of paragraph 4 (lines 102-119) also requires literary support not only from Chinese research.

-    Paragraph 5 (lines 120-131) requires linguistic corrections and an unambiguous definition of the purpose and scope of the research as well as the formulation of research hypotheses.

2.   The methodology requires supplementing, inter alia, the method of calculation (and literature), e.g. "" industrial productivity index "," industrial influence index ", etc. In Chapter 2.3, you must specify which data are specifically extracted from each statistical data and report.

3.   The results of grouping "Clustering results", and especially the characteristics of a given group, should be more supported by numerical results from the conducted analyzes.

4.   The conclusions require improvement as they contain repetitions, and the conclusions should result directly from the analyzes carried out.

 

Technical Notes

 1.   The " marking the text" should be removed, e.g. lines 120-131 etc.

2.   There is no description of the axis in figure 1.

3.   Column names and explanations under table 2 need to be improved.

4.   The description of the literature in "References" e.g. 12, 14, 19, 22, 39 etc. require improvement in accordance with the requirements of the MDPI publishing house. Literature items that are not journals (e.g. 12, 14, 31-37, 38) require a direct "link" of access and date (some website addresses provided are very general).

5.   The text requires linguistic and editorial correction.

Author Response

Thank you for your advice.Please see the attachment.

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

Paper discusses the evaluation of forestry industry, ecological and social values ​​in the provinces of China. The topic has great potential for an interesting geographic-economic study. The first impression of the study is in the Introduction, which in some parts covers too broad a topic and is written in general and not very specific, although this may be the nature of the chosen topic.

Starting with the Methods, even more confusion begins with inconsistent terminology, unreadable graphs, and the mixing of Methods and Results together.

It is possible to read the results with a very large degree of guesswork as to what belongs to what, but a scientific study should be easy to read at a glance.

The interpretation of the results is quite vague, lacking quantification of the created (selected) indices. Additionally, there are several other potential evaluation angles in the study that were not utilized.

 

 

The study needs a major overhaul before it can be published.

 

Note: In the review, I did not have time to evaluate all parts, such as the Conclusion, because I had limited time and the article needs to be improved in many parts.

Specific comments:

Introduction

In the overview of current research, there is a rather broad coverage of various areas - for example, the area of ethnic culture. It is necessary to focus the text more on the topic of the study.

Methods

L 156 Table 1

The title is "Evaluation index", but the table lists a number of indexes. The name should be "Evaluation indexes".

There are unclear units in the Table:

Million… what currency? Elsewhere you mention "yuan". In the Methodology, it should be stated in which currency the amounts in all the indexes used are given.

"Ha" – hectare units are usually abbreviated as "ha"

"in" – what kind of unit is that?

For units expressing the amount of a financial sum, the length of the period for which the sum was calculated is missing. "Annual" is listed for only one index.

L 158 "Note: The author designed and organized the data."

What is meant by this? After all, in every article the author usually designs and organizes the data.

L 208–211

Citations are missing for these statistical works. Although these are apparently ministry issued materials etc, there should be a source.

L 239 Table 2

Column headings should be capitalized

The "component" column is probably the individual indexes from Table 1, but due to the non-unified terminology, it is completely unclear. Additionally, it is not specified how the indexes are ordered; that is, which number expresses which index.

The table was created by PCA analysis from the raw data, therefore it should be in the Results chapter and not in the Methods. The interpretation of this table should be described in the Results chapter.

L 241 Note – this note is unnecessary because you already mention it earlier in the text. Please delete.

Results

L 251 Figure 1

These graphs are completely confusing. The captions are in small unreadable font and the Chinese language appears in the headings, there must be English.

L 266–269

In the text, the geographical connections and names of the areas "southern, northwest" etc. are given. But it is necessary to explain which provinces are found in the given areas so that the reader does not have to open the map.

L 269–275

The description of these development types is given in the Abstract and then here in the Results chapter. But it should mainly be in Methods. In addition, there is a need to unify the terminology: Once it is called "types" (in Abstract), then "development types" (in Results) and then "classification" (in Table 3).

L 282

Evaluation of development types: Instead of verbal evaluations such as "solid, excellent, superior, conspicuous, not ideal, bad" etc. there is a need to introduce a certain qualitative or quantitative rating scale in a scientific study. A quantitative evaluation of the indices from Table 1 would be useful.

L 305

Here is a mention of how the number of provinces rises in a given development type within the monitored period. This is the untapped potential of the results - it would be useful to evaluate the number of provinces in each type in the time period evaluated and to indicate what causes these different results in each year.

L 308–309

"Some of the provinces are ranked low mainly because the location is not dominant" - Which provinces are these specifically and what does "location is not dominant" mean?

L 303–311

From the assessment of "General development type", I have the impression that this is a mixed group that is not defined at all. It's kind of a broad average group with a lot of provinces. The overall assessment of development types appears unbalanced – there are no provinces that would stand on the opposite side of the spectrum in the assessment from well-developed types, i.e. poorly developed (whether due to low forest area, geographical isolation, etc.)

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is double ideologically framed: on the one hand in terms of the theoretical plot (the concept of cultural industry, developed by the Marxist thinkers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer), and on the other hand in terms of the practical objective, namely the  assisting of  general Chinese policy in the shaping of ecological civilization. This somewhat limits the level of generality of the paper. However, the effort "to construct an evaluation system for the development level of forestry-ecological-culture industry and accurately measure the comprehensive level of forestry-ecological-culture industry development in various provinces in China" (p.3) remains interesting.

 Although the authors seem to be aware of the problems raised by the use of the chosen statistical method ("Due to the large number of original variables in this study and the problem of multicollinearity, PCA can overcome the information overlap and calculation complexity of variables caused by the geometric growth of dimension, and reduce the interference of high correlation to the data analysis results (p.6)", I think it should be explicitly stated whether the variables presented in table No. 1 have been standardized or not. Standardization is also mandatory for the main component analysis and for cluster analysis, given the fact that the variables have different natures, have very different orders of magnitude and have different units of measurement.

 I also think that the four types obtained by cluster analysis (table no. 3) should be redefined, in order to reduce the ambiguity induced by their designations (e.g. sub-developed and underdeveloped). If the types illustrate a hierarchy, then I would suggest very high level developed, high level developed, medium level developed and low level developed.

 Also regarding the form, I recommend either eliminating or transforming the two sequences of words in the Introduction  into complete sentences (respectively "Concept definition of ecological cultural industry." and "Research on the evaluation of forestry-ecological-culture industry." (p . 2).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

In the summary, in the newly added (edited) text, as well as in the original text, other serious flaws were discovered after a deeper revision. The study requires a crucial reconstruction and adherence to scientific principles such as citing sources of information, uniform terminology and explanation of terms - either by description or reference.

 

L 123-130

 

The study has no hypotheses or questions. So what was tested, verified, what was answered?

 

L 154 Table 1

Yield of ornamental seedlings - why is the unit "strains" and not pieces?

 

L 209–210

The mentioned source "China statistical database" is not cited at all. Provide a standard citation and add the source to the References list. Moreover, this quote belongs to the "yearbook", as you write, and does not include "Chinese Cultural Relics, Chinese Culture and Related Industries and statistical bulletin of national economic and social development of each province". These are essential sources of information for the study and it is not clear where they come from.

 

L 230-232

Here the authors removed the reference to Figure 1 from the text, which had illegible captions with Chinese language headings. But now the results do not include the output of the clustering analysis, so it is not clear on what basis the provinces were classified into development types. Likewise, on L 254 "number of classifications is 4" refers to outputs that are not shown in the text. Even here it is not stated what classification it is. Removed Figure 1 displayed interesting and important data.

Therefore, it will be necessary to present the results of the clustering analysis in the text, preferably with an figure with a comment.

 

In addition, the software used should be listed.

 

L 241 – 248

Here are the expressions "component, composite variables, original variables" without explaining what set of values they represent. Where did they come from? A certain clue is on line 145, where there is "27 measurement variables" with a link to Table 1. But due to non-unified terminology, it is not entirely clear if these are the same variables as in Table 2. The basis is to unify the terminology.

Overall, the study lacks a subsection Terminology, where all used technical terms would be explained.

 

L 250 Table 2

It is still not explained what the "Components" in the table mean. There are only numbers without explanations.

On first review, I didn't notice how unsystematic the column headings were in the table. Obviously there are units of percentages (%) everywhere, so why does Variance say "percentage" and Cumulation says "%"? It should be uniform. Second, why is "Extraction of the sum of load squares" performed by doubling the data from the "Initial eigenvalue" columns? Copying data in this way unnecessarily expands the table. Why did the authors not make a horizontal line in the table delimiting the upper part where the "principal components" are?

 

L 247, L 275

The text once mentions "comprehensive evaluation index" and the second time "comprehensive score". Are these two different terms or the same term? And from what statistical method do these terms come (source)?

 

L 256

 

"The corresponding provinces (autonomous regions and municipalities) of each category are listed in Table 3." What category? This is the first mention of the term "category" in the text without an explanation of its meaning in the Methods.

L 297

In which specific other related studies? Please provide references.

 

L 308

“the number of provinces in the general development type“ - "General development type" no longer exists according to the new classification.

 

L 282

This note is unnecessary, it only more or less repeats the table label.

 

L 284

The authors still did not provide a sufficient quantitative or classificaton assessment of indexes of particular provinces. Here are a few cases:

L 300-305

What is "second category in the cluster analysis"? It is not explained in the Methods. What does "high comprehensive index" mean quantitatively?

"The investment in forestry informatization construction is emphasized" - What exactly does this mean?

Expressions characterizing the level of a given index should at least have some chosen classification, scale.

Or explain why you cannot provide specific values for more indexes. Thus, the study is based on information sources that are unknown to the reader (see L 208-211) and also most of the values are not published, why?

 

L 312

This sentence has not been improved in any way by its modification: "Some of the provinces are ranked low mainly because the location is not predominant" - Which provinces are these specifically and what does "location is not predominant" mean?

L 323

"comprehensive score of the transformation" - What it means, this quantity is not explained in Methods

"increased from the lowest 5.41, the lowest in 2014, to the highest 7.30, the highest in 2018" - How was this score calculated, what do these values mean?