Untangling the Integral Impact of Land Use Change, Economic, Ecological and Social Factors on the Development of Burabay District (Kazakhstan) during the Period 1999–2021

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article entitled “Untangling the integral impact of Land Use Change, Economic,
Ecological and Social Factors on the Development of Burabay district
(Kazakhstan) during the Period 1999–2021” which is really interesting to denote how you analysis the spatial growth of urbanization and quantify the impacts of the economic, social and ecological factors in the development of the district. There are so many lacunas in this manuscript.

General comments:

Abstract:

Abstract is well written. Still, there is a structural issue in the sentence. Lines 18-20, the sentence starts with “The DM….EES indicators”. Please do the correction.

Introduction:

Introduction section needs some more elaboration related sustainable development along with urban resilience, although the urban resilience concept is well explained in this section. Moreover, you have to incorporate hoe unplanned population growth impacted on environment and developmental activities which is completely missing in the introduction. These things provide more attraction to the other researchers. Otherwise, readers show less interest in reading.  

Lines 50-54: You may give some more strong statements using following links:

https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11642-250304

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geosus.2021.06.002

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.103196

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2022.102842

Results:

In the resulting section, analysis of result is quite hazy; make it clear and explicit.

Temperature and precipitation figures are irrelevant better to remove it from the manuscript for the quality of this article. Title of the manuscript does not contain climatic variables or factors. In my opinion, author should have to remove those irrelevant figures from the manuscript.   

Author should have to revise the Table 14. Omit the climate factor from the table. It has no such direct relation with the development a district.

Discussion:

In this section, you have to discuss more about how your results are relevant and exploratory in response to previous study that is completely lacked in throughout the discussion section.

Conclusion:

 Please add a conclusion section separately. Otherwise the manuscript is pretty confusing at the end and least interested as well.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 1

We greatly appreciate your comments on our manuscript and provide our responses to them.

Abstract:

 

1. Lines 18-20, the sentence starts with “The DM….EES indicators”. Please do the correction.

For a better perception and understanding of this sentence, we have made an amendment and divided them into two parts/ sentences, putting a dot in front of “SD trend….”

At the same time, it is difficult for us to abandon the reduction of DM (Driving Mechanisms), SD (sustainable development), STD (spatiotemporal data) and EES (economic, environmental, and social). Their meanings have been given in previous sentences. The need for abbreviations is caused by the requirements of the "Sustainability", according to which the number of words in the Abstract should not exceed 200. There are 198 of them in the manuscript.

If there was a misunderstanding of your remark on our part, please clarify. We will certainly eliminate them.

Introduction:

 

2. «Moreover, you have to incorporate how unplanned population growth impacted on environment and developmental activities which are completely missing in the introduction. These things provide more attraction to the other researchers. Otherwise, readers show less interest in reading.»

We are fully agreeing with you regarding the inclusion of unplanned urban population growth affecting the environment. Therefore, in the original text of the manuscript, we provide a direct link to 17 sources [10-25]. In addition, the careful reader may see many other literatures that also contain materials related to unplanned urban population growth affecting the environment.

According to our conceptual approach (Figure 1), we should, if possible, present a balanced argument in three important areas based on the trinity of the city, the agro-industrial complex and the national natural park. As you yourself note, we have achieved such a goal, and we have well explained the trinity of sustainable development, which is our main goal.

In our opinion, an in-depth analysis of unplanned urban population growth affecting the environment is extremely useful, but it is beyond the scope of our study. In addition, the number of references to literary sources is quite impressive for one article 121 and its subsequent increase, in our opinion, is not entirely appropriate and exceeds the psychological barrier.

At the same time, if you insist, we do not refuse to expand the "Introduction" if you kindly suggest specific attractive literary data, as you did below.  

3. Lines 50-54: You may give some more strong statements using following links: https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-11642-250304, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geosus.2021.06.002, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2021.103196, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2022.102842

We express our sincere gratitude to you for this offer, with which we gladly took advantage of: Lines 119-127 in the new edition.

“Currently, there are strong epistemological tensions among researchers regarding the use of modern concepts and paradigms to assess urban development. For example, an analysis of the opinions of researchers in this direction made it possible to substantiate the importance of four approaches to assessing the development of cities: sustainability, resilience, transformation, and adaptation [26]. It is quite natural that these concepts are subject to further concretization and require clear and precise definitions. At the same time, the results of studies based on the application of the adaptation strategies, checks the resilience in combination with different forecasting models are quite interesting [27-29], which help to create a conceptual framework for achieving the SDGs.”

4. Results:

 

4.1. “In the resulting section, analysis of result is quite hazy; make it clear and explicit.”

In this section of research, we have tried to describe only the results obtained with minimal discussion, as is customary in academic journals. At the very end of the section, we pointed out the possibility of an integral assessment of the development of the AOI, which clearly and correctly emphasizes the value of the results obtained.

But we are ready to kindly correct any inaccurate descriptions of research results that you find if we have made such omissions.

 

4.2. “Temperature and precipitation figures are irrelevant better to remove it from the manuscript for the quality of this article.

We kindly want to draw your attention to Table 14 (new edition), where such climatic 

factors as Precipitation, average annual (Х10: F2 =0.919); Precipitation, during the period vegetation (X11: F2 = -0.876) and Temperature, average for the vegetation period (X12: F2 =0.750) were included in the main components of the second order F2. This, in our opinion, indicates the importance of the given climatic factors for this region, which must certainly be taken into account by the management when planning land use. Therefore, we very much hope that you will not further insist on deleting Precipitation, average annual; Precipitation, during the vegetation period, and Temperature, the average for the vegetation period from the article.

Table 14. * PCA's rotated component matrix.

Variables	Depiction	Component
		F1	F2
X1	The volume of production in farms of all types	0,973	-0,164
X2	Average monthly salary in agriculture	0,970	-0,135
X3	Number of rural settlements with centralized water supply	0,966	-0,032
X4	Business entities	0,935	0,103
X5	Investments in fixed assets	0,830	-0,251
X6	Gross output of agricultural products and services	0,822	0,286
X7	EVI per vegetation period	0,086	0,976
X8	NDVI value for the vegetation period	0,137	0,975
X9	NDWI value for the vegetation period	-0,064	0,934
X10	Precipitation, average annual	-0,138	0,919
X11	Precipitation, during the vegetation period	0,019	-0,876
X12	Temperature, average for the vegetation period	-0,175	0,750

                                     *Rotation method: varimax with Kaiser normalization. Rotation converged in 3 iterations.

4.3. Title of the manuscript does not contain climatic variables or factors. In my opinion, author should have to remove those irrelevant figures from the manuscript.” 

You correctly noted that "Title of the manuscript does not contain climatic variables". However, the Title includes the word "Ecological", which includes climatic variables, which, as you have already noticed above, play a key role in the trinity of the city, the agro-industrial complex and the national natural park. In short, it is thanks to climatic factors that the uniqueness of the study area is preserved (mainly, it means the presence of a national natural park, which is preserved due to climatic factors and has a high recreational and health-improving function).

When comparing Tables 14,16 (new edition) and Figure 16, it is not difficult to see that climate change plays a significant role in the development of the Burabay region, and the facts already given from table 12 are another proof.

At the same time, we are ready to accept your opinion on this remark for execution if convincing facts are presented that deny our arguments.

5. Discussion:

 

“In this section, you have to discuss more about how your results are relevant and exploratory in response to previous study that is completely lacked in throughout the discussion section.”

When organizing the “Discussion section”, we were guided by the recommendations of "Sustainability MDPI" [https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions], which looks like this: “Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted in perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible and limitations of the work highlighted. Future research directions may also be mentioned”.

This section consists of seven paragraphs, each of which is interpreted in terms of previous literature, presented as broadly as possible, highlighting the shortcomings, and at the end of the section mentioning future directions of research (paragraph 6), as well as ways to use the results of the study (paragraph 7).

At the same time, there are some omissions in separate paragraphs, which should be supplemented. Therefore, we further provide an assessment of the correctness of all paragraphs of the section separately, making changes to them if necessary.

The first paragraph is devoted to the choice of the LULC classification algorithm using the GEE platform, where, based on the analysis of previous studies, the advantages and disadvantages of RF, CART and SVM were identified. From the context of this paragraph, it is clear that use of RF for this type of research is more promising. But, in the first draft of the manuscript, we avoided imposing RF on future research.

After your suggestions, we supplemented the first paragraph with the following sentence, which has a critical meaning: Line 846-849 (new edition) “At the same time, we do not deny that in other studies, depending on the goals and objectives, the successful use of both CART and SVM is quite possible. The proof of this is the relatively small difference in the overall accuracy of the classification between the algorithms used - 0.95-0.97. »

In the second paragraph, we present the advantage of Landsat images and discuss its disadvantages, pointing to Sentinel 2 and Planet. The paragraph ends by emphasizing the shortcomings of the used images and pointing out the remote sensing data, which has significant potential for improving the recognition of land use change. We do not add to this paragraph.

In the third paragraph, there is a smooth transition to a discussion of the system of methods for academic assessment of sustainable development as RF, multiple linear regression, inter categorical transitions and calculation of sustainable development trend. In this case, the paragraph ends with an indication of the weaknesses of the methods used. Given the usefulness of the presentations to this paragraph, they also did not make an addition.

The fourth paragraph clearly and clearly shows the results obtained for changing trends for each class of LULC and critically indicates their relationship to the data of other researchers in the world and Kazakhstan. The paragraph remains unchanged.

The fifth paragraph indicates the main reason for the development/recession of AOI in space and time, as well as literature data confirming these changes worldwide. The paragraph is unchanged.

The sixth paragraph is devoted to the future direction of research. According to the authors of the article, the results of their research should become a function of the NSDI 2.0 RK. To do this, links are provided on the steps taken in Kazakhstan in this direction.

 Considering the limitation of the future direction of research only to Kazakhstan, this paragraph ended with the following sentence, which has the same critical meaning:

Lines – 902-907 (new edition).  «At present, our development is protected by copyright [120] and is still only part of one of the country's geo services [121]. At the same time, future directions of research in other countries may be adjusted based on the level of development of space-time data and other circumstances: economic, environmental, social, political, as well as the level of technological development.»

The seventh paragraph is the final one, where the results of the research can be applied for. The paragraph remains unchanged.

 

6. Conclusions:

 

“Please add a conclusion section separately. Otherwise the manuscript is pretty confusing at the end and least interested as well.”

The reason for the abandonment of the “Conclusions” section in the first draft of the manuscript was the statement of  “Sustainability”:

 “This section is not mandatory but can be added to the manuscript if the discussion is unusually long or complex.” [https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions].

  But, realizing the high value of your recommendation, we included the Conclusions section in the manuscript.

Lines – 914-937 (new edition).  “The conducted studies have shown the effectiveness of assessing the development of an administrative-territorial district based on the integration of economic, environmental, and social indicators around spatiotemporal data. The proposed system of methodological approaches allowed: to process Landsat 5/7/8 space images using the high-performance web platform Google Earth Engine; to determine the dynamics of five Land Use and Land Cover classes from 1999 to 2021 based on the use of the machine learning method (RF algorithm) with high accuracy; to prove the steady increase in the composition of the Land Use and Land Cover Cropland classes and the decrease from year to year in the share of Pasture through the development and analysis of the Confusing and Transfer matrixes; to reveal that the main Driving Forces of Development of the Burabay district are economic factors, which was carried out using Multiple Regression Analysis and Principal Component Analysis; to show the Development trend of the Burabay district using multi-stage processing of 36 indicators combined into five groups (demographic, economic, environmental, social and climatic) from 2010 to 2021. It should be noted that the proposed set of methodological approaches is quite promising. For example, most of the leading experts in Kazakhstan still use only economic and statistical methods to assess sustainable development at the national level. For this, spatiotemporal data are not involved, the need for which has been convincingly proven by many works of researchers. The results of our study can be used to assess the sustainable development of the Burabay district based on the most objective instrumental spatiotemporal data, considering economic, social and environmental information. The developed system of methodological approaches can easily be scaled to analyze the development of larger administrative-territorial units.”

 

We really hope that we were able to respond to all your comments and listened to almost all of your recommendations, which contribute to the improvement of the article itself and its perception by sophisticated readers. In addition, we believe that our individual objections are sufficiently substantiated and well reasoned, and you will perceive them positively.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The effort of understanding LULCC, ecological, economic and social impact on the development of Burabay district is quite interesting and will bring a significant contribution in this field.

Besides this, the manuscript needs some improvements.

 

L193 Authors should avoid words like “majestic” and “nature of amazing beauty”. These terms doesn’t fit to scientific research.

 

Subsection 2.2. Datasets, used in this research should be described better. What Landsat data were used? 5, 7 or 8? What bands were used? Resolution of Landsat, VIIRS, Terra, etc.?

L233 Under NOAA term did you mean Suomi NPP or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?

Description of NDVI, NDWI and EVI should be added. What is the purpose of using EVI and NDVI at the same time, if EVI is a modified version of NDVI for optimizing signal from vegetation in areas with high LAI index? Thus, it is better to clarify it in this subsection.

Also, if authors used GEE, they should clarity, did they used image for specific day or create median or mean composite for the whole 2021 year.

 

1.3.2. It is a good idea to add number of samples for each LULC category to show dataset balance, if RF model was used.

 

I wish that my comment would be helpful in improving the quality of this research.

Thank you.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 2

we greatly appreciate your comments on our manuscript and we present our answers to them. 

 

1. “Subsection 2.2. Datasets, used in this research should be described better. What Landsat data were used? 5, 7 or 8? What bands were used? Resolution of Landsat, VIIRS, Terra, etc.?”

We fully agree with you that “Data Sets, used in this research should be described better”. However, when we compiled the manuscript, when describing this information as text, the level of Plagiarism obtained using iThenticate turned out to be very high. Therefore, in the last version of the manuscript, we did not provide this information but referred only to the literature [55-64], which describes them.

If you do not mind, we would present this information in a tabular form as indicated below:

Lines 249-265 (new edition).

… [59-68]. Some characteristics of the parameters of the Satellites and Data Sets we used are shown in Table 1.

 

Table 1. Characteristics of some parameters of Satellites and Data Sets.

Satellites/ Data Sets	Bands	Resolution
Landsat 5	B1, B2, B3, B4	30 m
Landsat 7	B2, B3, B4, B5	30 m
Landsat 8	B2, B3, B4, B5	30 m
SNPP VIIRS	avg_rad	463,83 m
DMSP OLS	avg_vis	927,67 m
SRTM3	elevation	90 m
Terraclimate	pr	4638,3 m

2. “L233 Under NOAA term did you mean Suomi NPP or National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration?”

Yes.

By NOAA we meant Suomi NPP.

Therefore, in order to avoid confusion, we from text 2.2. Data Sets removed the word "NOAA" from the first line and wrote "Suomi NPP VIIRS" instead. Lines 246 (new edition).

The same was done on the third line 2.2. Data Sets: Deleted "NOAA S-NPP VIIRS" from bracketed text and replaced it with "Suomi NPP VIIRS". Lines 248 (new edition).

 

3. “Description of NDVI, NDWI and EVI should be added. What is the purpose of using EVI and NDVI at the same time, if EVI is a modified version of NDVI for optimizing signal from vegetation in areas with high LAI index? Thus, it is better to clarify it in this subsection.”

In principle, we are not opposed to adding a description of NDVI, NDWI, EVI and explaining the meaning of the simultaneous use of EVI and NDVI, which we have done below.

NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) - a simple measure of the amount of photosynthetically active biomass. NDVI one of the most common and used indices for solving problems that use quantitative estimates of vegetation cover and calculated using the following formula: 

 

NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) is used to identify objects in open water spaces and highlight them on a satellite image against the background of soil and vegetation.

 

 

EVI (Enhanced Vegetation Index) - an improved vegetation index. Designed as an improvement to NDVI by optimizing the vegetation signal in areas with a high Leaf Area Index (LAI). The index uses the blue reflection area to correct background soil signals and reduce atmospheric forcing, including aerosol.

 

 

It should be noted that NDVI, NDWI, and EVI are widely used indices and are described many times in the literature, so it is not difficult for any interested reader to find their description. Moreover, in the manuscript, we give a link to these sources.

Based on the foregoing, we ask for your advice:

Maybe it's not worth the description of NDVI, NDWI, and EVI and their formulas in the manuscript?

But, if you insist, we will definitely include it in subsection 2.2. all of the above descriptions of NDVI, NDWI, and EVI.

 

4. “Also, if authors used GEE, they should clarity, did they used image for specific day or create median or mean composite for the whole 2021 year.”

            We have added to the text a new version of the manuscript Line 266-267 (new edition) “When working in GEE, we used the median value of the composite in the range for June-July.”

 

5. “1.3.2. It is a good idea to add number of samples for each LULC category to show dataset balance, if RF model was used.”

We gladly followed your recommendation and placed the number of samples for each LULC category in Table 3. Lines 316-317 (new edition)

  

Table 3. Number of training and validation dots for each LULC category.

Samples	CL	PE	FT	WB	BU	Total
Training dots	551	583	208	43	15	1400
Validation dots	236	250	89	18	7	600

 

In addition, the following sentence was added to Line 309-311 of the new edition of the manuscript: "Number of training and validation dots for each LULC category is shown in Table 2 and Figure 6 shows the allocation of some of the example points in the Burabay district."

 

We very much hope that we were able to respond to all your comments and listened carefully to almost all of your recommendations, which were helpful in improving the quality of this research. In addition, we believe that our request for advice in paragraph 3 is sufficiently substantiated and well-reasoned, and you will perceive them positively.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf