Land Cover Changes of the Qilian Mountain National Park in Northwest China Based on Phenological Features and Sample Migration from 1990 to 2020

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

Your work is interesting and should be published. However, I have found that the state of the art requires implementation to make it more up to date, so you should at least cite the following works:

https://www.mdpi.com/2073-445X/12/1/42
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32580-x
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-022-00777-2

1. Land use changes in the Quilian Mountain National Park.
2. Your contribution is relevant to the field of research.
3. A new application perspective on land use analysis in protected natural areas.
4. Review and update the bibliography with the latest work.
5. It is a very complete and formally adequate work.

5. Conclusions are consistent with the evidence and arguments presented and they address the main question

6.  References are fine although they should be revised, expanded, and updated

7. Should be updated with some recent works.

Without further ado, congratulations.

Best regards.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Reviewer 2 Report

For this manuscript, a nice topic and acceptable methods were chosen. Land cover classification in mountainous locations has always been problematic. However, the manuscript needs a major revision. I recommend that the authors delete many of the generic and established themes from previous studies from the manuscript. For example, Table 2. In addition, the titles of the tables and figures are quite brief and ambiguous. My additional comments are as follows:

1- I propose that the article's title be made shorter. Because international readers may be unfamiliar with Qilian Mountain National Park, Northwest China will suffice.

2- The abstract's lines 11 and 12 must be modified.

3- Certainly, human causes are not the only ones influencing land cover changes. The definition of land cover in the first paragraph of the introduction should be updated. What kind of vegetation are we considering? Forest? or grasslands and pasture?

4- Please provide references regarding the variables that have influenced the Qilian Mountains' natural environment. Is it feasible to construct illegal hydropower plants?

5- Support with references object-based and pixel-based classification methods.

6- Research questions should be added at the end of the introduction and addressed in the conclusion.

7- The introduction part should be revised because the background of the methods and data sets utilized in comparable studies, as well as the study aims, are not thoroughly and effectively presented.

8- A legend is required for the flowchart of your research procedures.

9- Change the height in Figure 1 to elevation.

10- Tree species' scientific names should be italicized in the paper.

11- Table 2 should be eliminated.

12- There is no detailed description of the field data to clearly describe how you collected the samples. What is the significance of including UAVs in this section? Have you ever used it?

13- Please use Aspect rather than slope direction.

14- References for the equations in Tables 3 and 6 are required.

15- In addition to Kappa and OA, other accuracy criteria, such as F-score, are required to demonstrate the efficacy of your methodology.

16- The Discussion and Conclusion parts need to be revised.

17- What worldwide impact may your study have? Make this a bold topic.

 

18- Ask a native to revise your paper. some sentences need to be modified.

19-Which criteria are used for the selection of time points in the study?

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 

Comments to author:

I think the manuscript is well organized. The topic is also well suited for Remote Sensing. I believe this work could be ready for publication after minor revisions.

*1. Field Data: Line 149: How many land cover data you have collected in your field work? How many samples you have labeled on the Google Erath images? Please specify them. Line 155: please delete 、at the end of the sentence.

*2. Figure 5: Why is the number of trees only set to 500, have you considered trying to 2000 or even 5000? In addition, do you consider the influence of Mtry on the RF models?

*3. It would be interesting to compare your mapping results with the publicly available 30m resolution land cover products (Globeland30, GLC_FCS30, ESA_WorldCover etc.).

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear Authors,

My comments can be found in the attached file. Good luck.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

My comments can be found in the attached file.

Kind regards

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx