Study on Road Network Vulnerability Considering the Risk of Landslide Geological Disasters in China’s Tibet

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study used a multi-criteria heuristic analytical hierarchy process model, fuzzy comprehensive evaluation, and frequency ratio-interactive fuzzy stack analysis to generate a road network vulnerability in Tibet ,China. The manuscript requires major revision. 

The paper is missing the accuracy assessment part for the vulnerability map.

The Figures have very low resolution and are hard to see.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

This work overall doesn’t meet the minimum criteria for publication because:

1) significant poor English suffering from frequent flaws which must be proofread by native expert, 2) Incredibly beyond quality and unreadable Figures (All Figures!!!!), 3) Long and unreflective Abstract as it just lectures the known materials (specifically, the numbered parts), 4) Keywords should be representative and available in both Abstract and context. Here are just general except the last one, 5) Long and unjustified conclusion, 6) Poor technical Introduction in outlining the problem statement, pursued goal, the gap of previous works, the limitation which is going to be filled here, the applied method and why, what motives for, what is the main advantage of that over previous methods, any novelty, any contribution, ….!!!!!

Technically:

The whole of this work can be summarized as very simple routine overlay thematic layers in GIS where, Just as some trivial concerns:

First: the lack of novelty and contribution are deeply sensible. Just as a very simple example, to see the modification of MCDM approaches look at https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12517-022-10913-w, …

Second: the main prerequisite condition in this work is the use of the unified pixel size and it definitely cannot work for images with different resolutions. Therefore, Table 1 in the case of the used thematic layers absolutely cannot be overlaid. Resizing, reclass or cropping NEVER can be the response. Your solution??? Any image enhances processing??? Image fusion??? I couldn't find any treatment for different pixel size images. You are strongly recommended to have look at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0341816219303674 dedicating a novel approach for pixel unification and LSM.

Third, the main resolution of the used causative factors??? The resolution of output??? How many pixels in each thematic layer??? Columns and rows??? total overlaid layers???

Fourth, the main difference of ‘vegetation index’ and NDVI???

Fifth, what about the overlay procedure and considered criteria for weighting??? Any sensitivity analysis based on weight database to show the importance of the used causative factors???? https://iwaponline.com/jh/article/22/3/562/72506/Updating-the-neural-network-sediment-load-models, …

Sixth, what criteria the Figs 4 and 5 are scaled?????

Seventh, long discussion on the used datasets, any analyses/data visualization in considering the features selection based on missing values/variance/correlation with other features/trends or patterns/presence of outliers/center of data/skewness/spread among the data members/type of probability distribution that the data follows and … are obviously missed and lacked.

Eight, definitely poor discussion in terms of accuracy performance, validation data, verification metrics, evidential analysis and comparison. Any discussion on limitations of presented method? Can you prove the convergence or stability of the model???? Any explicit discussion to illustrate the limitations, pitfalls and practical difficulties of applied models under certainty???? The work lacks a prior impact assessment and cost-benefit analysis and did not anticipate solutions for the possible consequences in advance. How did you verify the fairness of made decisions??? Can this model provide correct inferences and some explanation for the underlying phenomena???? Can users gain a mechanistic understanding of that???? How the inclusion of the uncertainty for clean datasets and then achieved outcomes has been handled??? What about the reliability-based analysis? Have a look at state-of the-art techniques like https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11053-022-10051-w and … can give you deep insights.

Ninth, what about the importance of lithology and distributed subsurface soil layers in landslides? 

Significant poor English which MUST be proofread by native expert.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Good for the publication in the present form

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

In this work, the authors based on relevant research results and expert consultation, regional characteristics, evaluation factors, and an index system were selected, and thus the road network vulnerability in the study area was evaluated. This may contribute to the maintenance or the future construction of the road network in the Tibet region in the context of geological hazards. I have a list of major and minor comments for the authors to consider

1. In the introduction, the importance of landslide hazards, the definition of vulnerability, and the assessment methods are introduced. Two suggestions here for the authors' consideration. First, a systematic summary of the process and progress of road network vulnerability research is lacking; second, the background for establishing a link between landslide hazards and road network vulnerability evaluation is improved and the logical connection between them is strengthened.

2. In this paper, the basis for the selection of the "index layer" needs to be clearly explained. The authors explore the link between landslide hazards and road network vulnerability in Tibet region, but for the "index layer", the authors select the natural factors affecting landslide hazards, in fact, the influence of human engineering activities on landslide hazards may also be significant, why it is ignored in the Method 3.1. However, why the authors mentioned in the section 4.1 that human engineering activities are an important factor influencing the distribution of landslide hazard.

3. The tectonic activity in Tibet is very complex, and the authors considered the distribution of faults in the road network vulnerability evaluation, but for the road network vulnerability evaluation (either in the past, present or future), it is more important to focus on active faults, and stable old faults probably should not be considered. Therefore, how the authors consider the nature of faults in their assessment methods? In addition, how the authors consider sudden hazards like earthquakes, because the impact of a strong earthquake on the vulnerability of road network may be greater than the long-term combined effect of other factors (rainfall, distance from river systems, etc.).

4. How do the authors evaluate the resolution of the data in Table 4? Further, this is closely related to the reliability of the vulnerability evaluation results of the road network in Tibet region. Although the results of the evaluation are tested in section 4.2, can the authors provide further evidence, such as the current status of the road network.

Minor comments

5. All the figures are not clear in the manuscript and I could not get more detailed content or more critical information according to the legend. Therefore, it may be necessary for the author to load the figures in high resolution separately.

6. Figure 1 should be supplemented with data on the distribution of geological hazards, especially those that may be closely related to the road network.

7. The typeface of equation 7 is not uniform.

8. In line 304, does vulnerability refer to the road network or to geological hazards? If it refers to the vulnerability of the road network, then with an increase in vulnerability level, the geological disaster occurrence rate increases significantly. This conclusion may be inappropriate here, because the authors did not state the evaluation results of the vulnerability classification of the road network in the Tibet region before that.

9. Lines 317-318, please give the method for calculating the percentages of the vulnerability distribution of the regional road network between cities. For example, Lhasa and Shannan Cities high vulnerability level may not be more than half.

10. In the conclusion section, the authors do not specifically analyze the mechanisms of geohazard occurrence (line 408) and suggest its deletion. In addition, the first conclusion needs to be rewritten, e.g., the paper does not discuss in detail the influence of climate change on geohazard susceptibility. Further, the authors should elaborate on the possible weight of natural factors on geohazards in the region, instead of simply describing that geohazards are influenced by these natural factors.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors have made sufficient changes as I requested.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for your responses. I read them carefully but I have some comments which need your more clarifications:

A) Try to provide short but concise response. I am no looking for summary of the suggested papers. They are just recommended for using. The main core is that how and why you consider these concerns.

B) The responses are not just for the reviewer but also may be the question of future readers, therefore, adding some descriptive statements can increase the quality of the work.

C) Based on the template of Remote Sensing, you have the line numbers and I expected to see the exact line numbers corresponding to each comments (I mean the core of the response for each comment). Here actually I was lost to find the responses within the context. This is not the reviewers’ task to look up the context and find the responses.

Therefore, please make another attempt and highlight the above mentioned concerns.  

About the comments:

For example,

#1. You responded ‘The literature was cited in the systematic summary of research progress, and comparative experiments and regional applications are attempted in the future related studies.’, could you please where of the MS?

#5. ‘The VPM is a common straightforward SA technique for ANN-based models which can be achieved by analyzing the output disturbance due to perturbed inputs.’ is an AOT method. The main concern for this comment is to evaluate of input causative factors on the predicted output. In overlay procedure you need to have the weights and this the reason why this comment is left.

 

#8. Actually was lost with the response. Make it shorter and concise. Specify each response for the left questions one-by-one and clarify them within the context through assigning the line numbers.

English of the work needs some polishing by help of native expert.

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

The manuscript has been revised according to the reviewers' suggestions and the quality of the manuscript has improved. However, the font form of numbers in the text needs to be checked, e.g., for consistency between tables and in the main text.

Author Response

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Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Dearauthors

Thanks for your responses. Although I didn't get appropriate feed back in the case of #1, #5 and #8 referring to your reply  'We highly appreciate the reviewers’ comments and suggestions here.' but to respect your efforts I don't open new discussion to elongate the process.

Just as a minor reminder, the refrence list must be double checked:

For example, L567-569: must be modified as 'Maghsoudi Moud, F., Abbaszadeh Shahri, A., van Ruitenbeek, F., Hewson, R., van der meijde, M. Evaluation of the modified AHP-VIKOR for mapping and ranking copper mineralized areas, a case study from the Kerman metallogenic belt, SE Iran. Arab J Geosci 2022, 15, 1756 doi: 10.1007/s12517-022-10913-w.' because the first name of authors are missed, you have '.pdf.' in the title which shouldn't be, ...

Good luck

Some minor flaws needs to be treated. However, the production department may also help. 

Author Response

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