Assessing the Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Current Coastal Ecosystems—A Canadian Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The contents requested for revision were modified or explained. There are no revisions needed.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comment. We have submitted the revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Quan and co-authors

Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Authors presented good written and well-structured paper with clear aim and powerful discussion. I think the article might be accepted as it is.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comment. We have submitted the revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Quan and co-authors

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

Quan Van Dau et al. have submitted their manuscript titled "Assessing the Potential Impacts of Climate Change on Current Coastal Ecosystems – A Canadian Case Study" for review and potential publication in the journal Remote Sensing.

The authors conduct a study about the climate impact on the ecosystem along the coast of Prince Edward Island. They employ traditional ML methods and accuracy assessments to segment and classify different land uses and compare their area changes over time. In addition, they employ flood models to study the impact on land cover.

The manuscript makes an interesting read and while the approach is not novel in itself, the application in this particular field is a valuable addition to the literature and the results help to assess the potential impact and to eventually adjust strategies to mitigate the impact. A more innovative aspect is provided through storm surge scenarios which are an interesting and valuable addition.

A number of comments and suggestions follow hereafter:

L111ff: "The main purpose of this  research is to use the most recent land use land cover (LULC) information to evaluate how potential climate change-induced coastal flooding and storm surges that would affect the current coastal ecosystems in PEI." --- It would be helpful to clearly state the objectives. What is it that the authors want to investigate, how they are going to do that (in short), and what are the expected results and impact? This objective as it is phrased here is quite ambiguous and diffuse.
Other than that the introduction reads very well. I would, however, suggest including some more representative literature -- for an introduction, it seems a bit thin.

L152ff. "Therefore, it is very important to understand the impacts of climate change on the ecosystems to develop effective adaptation strategies for managing the island’s habitat and beyond." --- agreed, but in general, how to distinguish effects from climate change and from standard weather phenomena, such as random storms? The climate change as it is studied here is through storm surges -- which is, in fact only on expression.

L161ff: The standard climate period is 30 years. The authors here observe a time period that is much shorter. I am missing the reasoning for that. Could the authors please provide more background and justification? L174: Why not add Landsat 7 ETM?

L177: Please provide some background for Design Flood Elevation (DFE) maps.

L190: "all the Landsat images were merged for 1 to 30 days each year to ensure coverage for  PEI," --- would the authors provide more detail on what they mean by this? This confuses me a bit and it impacts the results quite a bit, I would think.

L195: "Before using the data, surface reflectance was scaled with a scale factor of 0.0000275 and an offset of -0.2 per pixel," --- please explain, for each band? And the offset is for the DN conversion, "offset ... per pixel" seems quite misleading. The authors might want to be clear here.

I am missing a list of used images to provide a full reference. The best would be a table that includes image numbers and acquisition dates/times. After all, results need to be reproducible to some extent.

L284: What is the reason for forest loss, for example? It would be interesting to see which LUC has replaced others, with a focus on the change.

Fig 2: I'll be honest, I cannot see anything. My experience is that two sub-figures next to each other are the maximum that this page width can swallow. The authors might also consider removing some of the blank space around the island to be able to provide some larger-scale maps. Also, an annotation where significant changes occurred might be helpful. After all, 3% is a rather small number.

For comments on Figs 5 and 6 see comment for Fig 2.

Table 1: The table is good, but I also believe that a graph would visually be quite instructive to see potential trends and correlations. With correlation, the authors could discuss potential causation. Just as a suggestion.

L387: These are important points, but I am still concerned about how the data merge over the year has been managed. As noted above, this merge is unclear to me and if it spreads the entire year, there will be considerable misrepresentation of statistics. I would like to see some discussion about that matter.

L412: Effectively, the PAN channel might contribute significantly to the detection, which means an improvement in resolution. Have the authors made any experiments with that?

Either the discussion or the conclusions lack a decent discussion that compares their methodological approach and their findings with the results of other researchers. There are plenty of published papers on ecosystem changes and both, effects and approaches need to be put into context. What is the main advance this study brings?

Also, I would like to see some discussion related to UN SDG as this hits the spot. However, nothing has been mentioned in that respect.

Finally, a discussion about how the results and/or the methodology could be employed for policy-making would be interesting. The authors mentioned policy-making themselves, so then I would ask, how would that study contribute? The statement "Finally, the findings are expected to benefit the policymakers to take appropriate actions to protect ecosystem services in PEI while addressing the effects of climate change"" is quite ambiguous...

I recommend a major revision due to some shortcomings in the discussion and conclusions.

English is in principle fine. Some minor issues with some prepositions or awkward structures.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comment. Please find our response in the attached file.

Kind regards,

Quan and co-authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report (New Reviewer)

I thank the authors for addressing my comments and for incorporating a number of changes. I have no further comments and look forward to seeing this manuscript being published.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I strongly suggest adding a more detailed and precise description of the ecosystem–climate nexus in the first part of your research. You'd better show the functional relationship between some climate change indicators and the change in land types, which would considerably add scientifical value to the article. 

Meanwhile, you should pay attention to the format of the titles of your figures and tables, as they should be consistent. And considering the high resolution of your research data, you should upload some images with higher pixel quality. It will make it easier for your readers to acknowledge parts of your outcomes.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We highly appreciate your comments, which have helped us in improving the quality of the manuscript. We have carefully addressed the comments and our responses to the specific questions are attached in this revised submission.

We also shared all of the high-resolution figures with the academic editor because there is no way for us to upload the figures in this response section.

Thank you so much,

Quan and co-authors 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Remarks are in file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We appreciate the reviewer for taking the time to review our manuscript. Unfortunately, the comments we received from the reviewer via the editor presumably pertain to a different manuscript with the reference number QG-D-22-00096. Meanwhile, our reference number for the manuscript is RemoteSensing-2388689.

 

We would be delighted to receive additional feedback from the reviewer, if applicable. 

Thank you so much,

Kind regards,

Quan

 

 

Reviewer 3 Report

The object of research is very relevant and with high potential impact for policymaking.

The paper is well structured. The methodology is clear. The results are well supported.

References: authors names should be mentioned correctly; not "et al."

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We highly appreciate your comments, which have helped us in improving the quality of the manuscript. We have carefully addressed the comments and our responses to the specific questions are attached in this revised submission.

Thank you so much,

Quan and co-authors 

 

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf