Land Use, Climate, and Socioeconomic Factors Determine the Variation in Hydrologic-Related Ecosystem Services in the Ecological Conservation Zone, Beijing, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper studies the interactions of land use, climate change and socioeconomic factors on hydrologic-related ecosystem services. It uses the InVEST (Integrated Valuation of Ecosystem Services and Trade-offs) tools, multivariate analysis, and the Beijing Ecological Conservation Development Zone (BECD) as a case study object. The study period is from 2000 to 2018.
Abstract: (1) If we sum up the contribution percentages, we see that more than 30% of contributions come from some other sources. Are there a huge number of small sources (less than 4%), or some bigger ones?
Introduction: (2) At the end of Introduction, the authors introduce the target of their case study and describe what they intend to do in this paper. What are their contributions to science and what is the novelty of this paper?
Section 2: (3) A general comment: The authors should use the same terminology all the time. In Introduction they define the focus of the study to be “hydrology-related ecosystem services”, and the considered drivers as “land use, climate change, and (socio)economic” development”. In Table 1, they call the drivers as “land use, meteorology, and socioeconomic”. (4) There is an unclear sentence in the beginning of page 4: “all data were unified to a spatial accuracy of 90 km”. If this means the spatial grid size, it cannot be true.
Section 3: (5) A general comment: The authors have defined three drivers, but they analyze only one: the land use. How the climate has changed, or has it? In Section 3.3, they start to analyze the interactions between the drivers, but we know the effects of land use, only. (6) What is “shrubland” on line 209? (7) There is another unclear sentence on lines 232-3: “The three hydrology-related ecosystem services variables together accounted for 64.7% of the driving factors”. It is another way round: driving factors effect to the output variables. (8) Looking at Figure 8, we see that a considerable part of variation remains unexplained by the studied factors – for ES2 and ES3 more than a half. What are these unnamed factors?
Conclusions: Few words about the future research needs on this field are required.
No special comments.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript and providing valuable suggestions. We highly appreciate your insights and have carefully considered and incorporated your recommendations. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Overall the article is well written, but I have some query/suggestions
Please clearly mention what are the remaining gaps that the authors wanted to bridge, which was not addressed by past researchers based on the recent previous works done by other researchers.
Already lot of work has been done for different regions across the world on land use climate change. What is the major difference between previous work and your current work?
Authors can think of taking data on 10 years interval viz. 2020, 2010 and 2022 and find the changes whether in last decade the change was more than previous decade.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for reviewing our manuscript and providing valuable suggestions. We highly appreciate your insights and have carefully considered and incorporated your recommendations. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
