Environmental Hazards of the Railway Infrastructure of Kazakhstan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer Comments

The authors have written on ‘Environmental hazard of the railway infrastructure of Kazakhstan”. I believe the readers would find the article more interesting if most of the sentences in the introduction and abstract were appropriately linked to each other. I suggest the service of a language editor to ensure that the manuscript is free from any form of grammatical error. In addition to previously stated observations, the following suggestions should help improve the quality of the manuscript:

This paper is well written; however, I have a few concerns before it is ready for acceptance

General Comments

     The authors need to create a subsection under the introduction section clearly stating the contributions/novelty/aims or objectives of this research.

     The authors also need to include a research organization in the last paragraph under the introduction section.

     All the figures in this manuscript need to be enlarged.

     Are the environmental hazards described/explained in this manuscript only applicable to Kazakhstan? More about this should be explained in the results and discussions section.

     Figure 6 is confusing; can the authors go into a little bit more in detail?

     The authors need to include subsections explaining in detail the recommendation and limitations of the study immediately after the conclusion.

 

     The authors need to cite recently or journal papers published within the last 5 years, some of the references are old.

Author Response

Please find attached our response. Best regards, 

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

See the attached file for comments.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, We are very sorry, but your comments were not included in our first review. because your revision was not uploaded to the system.

I carefully checked all our actions and you were not in the system. We initially had ONLY 2 reviewers, to whom we responded carefully. We now access your comments.

In any case, we enclose our modified manuscript and our responses.

Our kind regards,

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The research evaluates the possible environmental hazard of the railway infrastructure of Kazakhstan as a case study. Considering the interesting topic and limited references, the contribution of this study has been clearly stated. A major revision is required for improvement.

(1). Despite the well-known method, the pertinent concept of WO tool should be explained by referring to other research.

(2). Considering the environmental vulnerability, the main conclusion in Section 5 can be predicted before investigation. In this condition, the Conclusion should be reorganized by adding more quantified results. The development suggestions are preferable.

(3). The presented results are limited to the used case. The applicability of the obtained results or used method should be commended for other countries.

 

(4) Figures require much more fidelity, especially figures 1, 4, and 5. The Font size and style in figures should be unified. In addition, please expand the figure captions, so the figures are almost self-explanatory.

Author Response

Please find attached our response. Best regards, 

The authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

You have not incorporated my any comment given previously in the revised file. You are required to incorporate these all appended below. 

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I have thoroughly reviewed this manuscript and suggest the authors to revise the document by incorporating the following comments.

General comment

·         Manuscript suffers from several grammatical mistakes and English writing standards for the manuscript is not up to benchmark. Currently English of article is horrible; authors are suggested to take the help of native speaker for English editing.

Abstract

·         Remove the background-related sentences from the abstract and just discuss the why, when, where, what and how of the study. Lines 29-31 are giving no information. These and like general statement should be avoided.

·         Give the specific solution(s), how is the study expected to provide any solution to that problem?

Introduction:

·         References should be cited correctly; citations like the Lacey R. F., Cole J. A. [14] need correction.

·         After reading article's introduction section it seems this work is trying to find the impact of railway infrastructure on Saiga tatarica. Instead, authors should discuss how selected variables, e.g., soil cover, water resources, rainfall, protected natural areas, and population, fit into the study framework.

·         The introduction should highlight the policy-level environmental problems because of the railway and their possible solution. You can highlight these as research questions or study hypotheses.

·         Figure 1 is irrelevant and unclear. Replace it with a relevant one; all figures should come with 1200 dpi and their source should be mentioned after the caption.

·         Improve the motivations and implications of the study. I could not find the reason for the conductance of this study in the whole document. It would help if you highlighted the research gap correctly; only lines 93 to 97 cannot serve the purpose. Further, properly provide the references for all claims, especially regarding specific figures and years.

Review of literature

·         This section is currently missing, and authors are required to add this section.  

Methodology

·         How does the choice of sample is complementing that problem?

·         You are providing unnecessary details about study area. Remove the detail about corridors (lines 111-119), table 1 and table 2. Summarize the description of the variable given on pages 6-8.

·         Provide the theoretical framework of the study.

·         You are using abbreviations like CIS, JSC, NC without introducing them in many places, which is wrong. These are the primary scientific writing rules authors should follow.

·         Provide the diagram depicting the overview of the whole study area. Picture depicting the internal logical relationship between this research's pillars is also required to serve as the layout.

·         It is important to emphasize how you have selected the applied model and why not the other available methods. The integral index indicator should be discussed here by providing its strengths over the other techniques.

Results and discussion

·         Currently, the interpretation and discussion of findings are poor and need improvement. Discuss what the meaning of these findings for the study area is. Add meaningful discussion from current and previous studies and compare your results with the recent and relevant literature.

·         You should also apply any robustness test to analyze the uncertainty of whether estimated effects of interest are sensitive to changes in the model!

Conclusions

·         Before providing conclusions, provide a summary in a few lines.

·         The policy recommendation section is weak, and the authors must revise it thoroughly—state results-based policy options for each indicator and region for environment policymakers of Kazakhstan.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, We are very sorry, but your comments were not included in our first review because your revision was not uploaded to the system.

I carefully checked all our actions and you were not in the system. We initially had ONLY 3 reviewers, to whom we responded carefully. We now access your comments first time. Now one of these reviewers does not appear and we can see your comments.

In any case, we enclose our modified manuscript and our responses.

Our kind regards,

Authors

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript has been revised according to the reviewer's comments. The reviewer does not have any further comments.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your appreciation. Your comments have been very valuable.
However, we continue the review process based on comments from other reviewers. Let's hope it doesn't change the above settings.

Our best regards,

Authors