Assessing Regional Public Service Facility Accessibility Using Multisource Geospatial Data: A Case Study of Underdeveloped Areas in China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This research estimated accessibility to three types of public services, including health, education and sanitation in an underdeveloped area of China, and explored how these accessibilities associated with local socio-economic characteristics. Though lots of data analysis had been done, I feel this work has some fatal flows in design and should not be published in this special issue. The followings are my major and minor concerns.

Major concerns

1.       This research did not propose any new data or new method in remote sensing. It is not clear to me how this work contributes to ‘the development of new observation and analysis tools to tackle and monitor types, magnitudes, and rates of environmental changes.’ Overall, I think this work fits better to a regional planning or public health journal, rather than ‘Remote Sensing’.

2.       The spatial scale of analysis is under the question. The authors would like to analyze relationships between accessibility and community characteristics. Then, for convenience, why not directly estimate the accessibility at the community level? There are many established GIS models, like the travel-cost model, gravity model and floating catchment area model. What is the rationale of estimating accessibility for 30-meter cells and then average them by community? Just because the research must use remote sensing data? Further, why comparison of accessibility was done between counties, rather than communities? In short, the selection of scales for data analysis was lack of justification and really confusing.

3.       Line 265-266, ‘use graph theory to create cumulative cost distance rasters as an iterative process…’. Please provide more details on this algorithm for other readers to replicate.

4.       The authors classified communities into 15 types and linked them to accessibilities, but they were not well discussed in the discuss section.

5.       Though lots of analysis results were presented, few efforts were devoted to discussing policy implications of these results. For example, what are specific reginal planning policies for the next decade to improve accessibility? Where are the areas that need to be prioritized?

Minor concerns

1.       A map of communities needs to be presented, since these spatial units had been frequently mentioned in the text.

2.       Figure 5 and 6, what is segment?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The proposed study investigated the public service facilities’ accessibility in underdeveloped areas based on multisource geospatial data. It has some interesting information and my major concerns are as followings:

---People consider different factors when choosing educational facilities，healthcare facilities, or sanitation facilities. Minimum cost distance was used as the only factor to evaluated the accessibility of these three types of facilities which need more justification.

---People was classified into four groups according to their socioeconomic status. What is the purpose of studying the relationship between these four groups and the three types of facilities’ accessibility?

--- The communities were classified into different groups according to the socioeconomic attributes. What implications does study the relationship between the communities and the accessibility of the three types of facilities have for urban planning and management?

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript has been improved significantly and could be accepted in its present form.

Author Response

We appreciate the reviewer's positive evaluation of our work.