Multidimensional Measurement and Enhancement Strategies of the Provincial Ecological Niche in the Yellow River Basin

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study calculated the provincial ecological niche of the Yellow River basin from 2005 to 2019 and proposed improvement strategies through spatial positioning by constructing an S-R-F provincial ecological niche measurement framework using the SEM model.

Minor concerns

1, English needs improvement.

2, The manuscript should be reconstructed using the template of Sustainability.

3, The abbreviations first appear in the manuscript should be explained, e.g. VUCA, S-R-F, SEM, not all the readers know what they mean.

4, The manuscript should have a section of the Study area, which shows the location and the basic information of the study area.

5, The equations and formulas in the manuscript are mostly not referenced, while they are not proposed by the authors.

 

Major concerns

1, What is the main contribution or novelty of this study? The authors should clarify in the Abstract and Discussions.

2, The construction of the manuscript is disordered. Section 3 Results and Discussions should be reconsidered, 3.1 Framework design and data sources should be in the section of Materials and Methods, 3.2 and 3.3 also contain many equations, which should not be in the Results and Discussions sections.

3, Section 3 Results and Discussions have nothing to do with the discussion.

4, 4 Improvement strategies should be rewritten, e.g. Lines 370-380, the authors used “…refers to ….” to make a paragraph, while they are not strategies.

5, How and why did the authors divide the study area into Subspace I, III, VI, and VIII? Explanations are needed to clarify.

6, There is no information about the important limitations and uncertainties of the study, and the results of the work are not self-critical.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and suggestions are in the uploaded attachment.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript has several shortcomings that need to be corrected.

The formal editing of the manuscript does not meet MDPI requirements, including citation.

It is not possible to formulate the same keywords as the title of the manuscript.

In the abstract, I completely miss the methodological aspects of the research and the goal of the manuscript. Please complete them.

The knowledge gap is well described, but significant work needs to be done to improve the quality of literature research. In particular, it is necessary to cite current sources from high-quality impact journals.

I lack a comprehensive literature search on the issue.

I lack a comprehensive discussion comparing the research results with other similar studies.

What are the limits of research? Where will the authors take their research next?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Happy to see that all the comments are addressed by the authors.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors modified the manuscript according to reviewer.