Introduction to Sand-Restoration Technology and Model in China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript has a systematic and comprehensive review of sand restoration over the world, and gives a description of desert ecological restoration. It provides readers with a general understanding of desert ecological restoration. In general, there are some suggestions for the manuscript.

1)line 88-94. Ulanbuh desert is not included in the literatures in English and Chinese according to the literature retrival.

2)line 91-92, 'Horqin Sandy Land, Hunshandak Sandy Land' appear twice in the adjacent two rows. 

3) The abscissa in Fig.2 needs to be unified to 2022 or 2021.

4) line 113-118, The volume of literature is different during 1990-2000, 2001-2009, 2010-2021. Can the authors describe the reasons?

5)line 142(2.2.4) Technical classification is detailed in the paragraph. However, what is the relationship between these restoration measures and the location, climate of the desertification area.

6)line 201, The authors insist that the sand management research has received more attention worldwide according to the increment of English literatures. However, the nationality of the authors of English literatures is undescribed in the manuscript, which is the key evidence of the conclusion.

 

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Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript presents an interdisciplinary study of soil science and sociology. The results provided by the authors is novel and interesting. The topic is within the scope of Sustainability. The English and the structure of the paper is adequate. Therefore, I can recommend publication after addressing the comments described below.

I suggest that the authors emphasize that the sand restoration is for deserts, not beaches. If keywords such as ‘sand restoration’ and ‘China’ are typed in the search engine, I think relevant papers bout ‘sandy beach restoration in China’ would be present. Is that beyond the scope of this study? Keywords e.g., sand barrier, wind erosion, vegetable restoration, are also terminologies used in coastal engineering. I suggest that the authors make a clear distinction in the introduction.

In Fig. 2, the bar chart is recommended to represent the numbers of paper about sandy land restoration with that on sandy beach restoration excluded if necessary. The font in the figure (e.g., Fig. 6) can be increased appropriately.

Please be careful with the formatting of your references. For example, Line Tian and others, 2018, Is others a surname of someone? Do you mean Tian et al., 2018?

Finally, the authors stated that ‘Research data are not shared’ in Line 288. Data used in this study are obtained from WOS and Chinese Zhiwang, why data availability is not feasible, please clarify.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Firstly, I think the title should be Brief introduction to sand.....

Secondly there are many small grammar mistakes in the text, so an in-depth proofing is needed. Also please check the Latin names (must be written in italics) and also common names (see comments on the text).

Third aspect is that I would have been interested to know (if available) what the success rate/efficacity was for the different technologies of ecological reconstruction reviewed by the authors. In this respect an additional column could be added in table 3 containing the success rate of the technologies.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Sustainability

 

General comments:

The manuscript entitled “Brief introduction of sand restoration technology and model in China” is an interesting manuscript which focusing on sand restoration technology in China. The beginning of introduction sets scene very nicely about history of sandy land research but the introduction did not cover background research on sand restoration technology. Materials and Methods and how the authors set up the structure of this paper is confusing. Is this supposed to be a research article or a review article? Results and Discussion will need to be revised when the major concerns have been addressed. Overall, I think that the manuscript idea is interesting and will be valuable for the scientific community. However, additional work is needed to address major concerns and improve several parts of this manuscript to be more transparency and justified.

 

 

Title

Why brief introduction? The authors indicated in the abstract that a comprehensive review is still lacking which I agree that it should be the main content of this paper.

 

Abstract

Line 11 “comprehensive review of sand restoration technology is still lacking” – currently, this version doesn’t contribute much to fill this research gap identified by the authors (Major concern).

 

Introduction

 

While the authors nicely introduced the readers about the history of sandy land research, the introduction need to focus much more on sand restoration technology. Currently, there’s not much details about sand restoration technique (Major concern).

 

For example, Line 56-58: “At the same time, new progress has been achieved through the implementation of desertification manipulate paintings and worldwide cooperation” – this statement doesn’t provide further details needed to understand the current state of worldwide cooperation.

 

Please correct all in-text citation format.  

 

Line 63: What do CNKI and WOS stand for?

 

 

Materials and Methods

Is this a review or a research article? Should it be a comprehensive review as indicated by the authors or is this a comparison between English vs. Chinses literature on sand restoration technology? (Major concern)

 

 

Results

Figure 1 is not informative and not consistent with a written result (Major concern).

 

Line 88 - 89 indicated that high frequency terms are “erosion”, “biocrusts” …. But in figure 1, the term is biological soil crusts. This has not been introduced to the readers, therefore, they will not understand. Moreover, how did the authors determined high frequency? Biomineralization seems to be bigger than erosion, but the authors chose erosion instead of Biomineralization, why?

 

Line 91 – 92: Where are these terms in figure 1B?

 

Figure 2: this paper is really about English vs. Chinses literature?

 

Line 123: Does Biology in Figure 3 really mean bioremediation? What is the meaning of bioremediation?

 

I think Table 3 is really great and should be the main focus of this paper.

 

Discussion

Line 204: Bioremediation might not be the right term to use here.

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors did not address this major concern "Is this a review or a research article? Should it be a comprehensive review as indicated by the authors or is this a comparison between English vs. Chinese literature on sand restoration technology?"

More like the latter one.

 

Author Response

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Round 3

Reviewer 4 Report

While the authors indicated in the response that several parts have been changed, however, several parts need to be checked for example Figure 1 (the combined version) has not been replaced. 

Author Response

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