Land Use, Land Cover Change and Sustainable Intensification of Agriculture and Livestock in the Amazon and the Atlantic Forest in Brazil

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This research addressed a realistic and important issue referring to the continuous reduction of natural forest in the Amazon and Atlantic Forest and recommended the Integration-Crop-Livestock-Forestry as sustainable practice. The topic is about the challenges relating to sustainability and the opportunity of sustainable intensification in Brazilian biomes, which in line with the interests of readers of SUSTAINABILITY.

 

In general, the expressions need to be improved.

• Too many complex sentences, incomplete sentences and unnecessary short graphs. For instance, lines 88-97, Line 521….
• Lines 37-40, Lines 55-58, please rephrase with short and clear sentences.
• Many conjunctions are not properly used and leading to misunderstandings. For instance, ‘in parallel’, ‘whether’, ‘still’, ‘thus’... at the beginnings of several paragraphs in the Introduction section.

 

Specifically,

1. Please mention the full name of ICLF systems in the Abstract. Line 38.
2. Line 43, Livestock
3. In the Materials and Methods section, you just described the feature of data. The way you processing the data how that leading to your results is missing.
4. Lines 179-184, the spatial resolution of the land use data should be mentioned.
5. Lines 240-241, and lines 252-253, if possible, it is better to explain the reasons for this abnormal number.
6. Line 258, what does the 'grazing class' means?
7. Figure 4, Please check the name of the vertical axis?
8. Figure 5,

8.1 it is better to mark the exact position and extension of Amazon and Atlantic Forest, which are your study areas.

8.2 In the legend:

(1) What are Biomes, why it is marked as white.

(2) Countries’ borders should be lines. But here they seems to be polygon.

9. In the discussion section, it is better to add several subtitles to make the Discussion section and your main points clear.
10. That would be better if you could discuss the different ICLF measures you recommended in Amazon and Atlantic Forest comparatively, based on your results.
11. Lines 503-506, How will the ICLF working in your study areas? is there any difference or specific features of ICLF in Amazon and Atlantic Forest compare to other successful cases you mentioned here?

If there is already successful ICLF in Amazon, what is the point or contribution of your research?

12. Lines 514-517, what's your point for this paragraph?

13. How do you consider the intensive use of natural resources causing land degradation， such as overgrazing, and should this ‘over-intensive’ be considered in your research?

 

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please make the abstract quantitative instead of describing only expansion or reduction.

Please remove “climate change” from the keywords.

Pg1, l38: What is ICLF systems?

Please split the last sentence of the abstract in an understandable way.

Pg2, l51: please change “To-gather” to “together”

Pg2, l55-57: please the remove the repeated line “they store 100 billion tons of carbon in its biomass, being an important carbon sink” and add references to the previous text

Pg2, l62: please change “due to its size of its territory” to “due to its territory size”

Pg2, l93: low animal performance and performance?

Pg2, l98: please amend the reference style in the text “Still, according to (Garcia et al., 2017), unlike farmers” and change “difficulty adapting to” to “difficulty in adapting to”

Pg3, l112: please use GHG in the l83 where “Greenhouse Gases” is first listed.

Pg3, l138: please mention which Landsat mission?

Pg3, l141-143: what does this sentence convey?

Pg4, l152-160: please split into small and understandable sentences to show what authors want to convey.

Pg4, l175:please replace “analyzes” to “analysis”

Pg4, l176: please replace “obtained by MapBiomas and livestock” with “obtained from MapBiomas and PPM”

Pg4, l179: please correct the sentence.

Pg4, l182: ArcGIS software?

Pg4, l204: extension or expansion?

Pg5, l209: Figure 1. Please replace “millions of hectares” to “Mha”

Pg5, l214: natural forest or native forest?

Pg5,6, l223-226: The authors said that the highest annual rate of land use change occurred between 1985 and 2007, with loss of natural forest and expansion of pasture and agriculture. But refer to Figure 1B, forestry planting shows dips while the graph of pasture represents reduction. Please explain

Pg8, l291: class grew 10.72 Mha (107.31%)?

Pg9: Figure 4, please correct the both y-axis

In the l459, what is called as sustainable intensification?

Pg12, l469: for example?

Please discuss some of the important results in the conclusion section which is important for a scientific publication.

Please add acknowledgement of the data used.

General comments

Most of the sentences were long running and unclear e.g., l59-75, l152-160 and 168-172.

Use complete text first and then use abbreviations e.g., greenhouse gasses as GHG

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The analysis of the data is very simple, and it was expected at least a narrative about the sustainability of the agriculture from 1985 till now. What are the factors that make sustainable or not the agriculture in the regions studied? How have the recommended practices been to get sustainability in the regions?

What are the main factors affecting the sustainability? Is there any characterization or typification of the farmers? How is the distribution of the size of the farmers? Are the farmers provoking contamination, erosion, or any other effects? Have the recommendations about sustainability been accepted?

The proposed sustainable alternative mentioned as a part of the objective has been proposed by another researcher’s long time ago, so there is not an original and new propose.  

Author Response

"Please see the attachment."

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Authors have incorporated the comments. Therefore, the paper can now be accepted for publication.