Rapid Reclamation and Degradation of Suaeda salsa Saltmarsh along Coastal China’s Northern Yellow Sea

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript "Rapid reclamation and degradation of Suaeda salsa saltmarsh 2 along coastal China’s northern Yellow Sea" uses Landsat imagery to reconstruct wetland dynamic in the Northern Yellow Sea in the period 1988-2018, highlighting the role of land reclamation, and finding a lesser impact of invasive species. The study is interesting and the manuscript is well organized and well written. The Introduction and the discussion are easy to follow, and the results are clearly presented. My only concern is related to the need of clarification of the supervised procedure used. Was it performed in ENVI or in another software? which was the procedure? selecting ROIs or polygon with habitat patches? how many ROIs (or polygons) have been used? covering which area and which period? Was the supervised procedure calibrated on Landsat 5 TM or Landsat 8 OLI? Was it validated transferring from one sensor to the other? The confusion matrix refers only to the field survey or also for the Google Earth imagery?

Please find the attached pdf for few specific comments.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Authors’ response: We would like to thank you for these constructive comments. We have carefully checked all the comments and made necessary revision to address each of them. We also asked one of our English-speaking co-authors (Dr. Huw Lloyd) to make further language formatting to achieve the publish requirement. We also welcome any further editorial suggestions to further improve our manuscript.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

In general, the manuscript is well written and can be followed up very easily. In particular,

1. The introduction is very good
2. The materials and methods section is very well written.
3. The results section should be better exploited
4. The discussion section is very ambiguous

I suggest the authors take as a basis the DESCR conceptual framework (e.g. Silva, et al., 2020) or a similar framework.

1. Identify: a) drivers, b) exchanges, c) state of the environment, d) consequences and e) responses.
2. In the Materials and methods section identify the drivers and exchanges. Some of them are already well identified.
3. In the results section, qualify the changes of state and their consequences.
4. The discussion section needs to be focused on the responses and how the drivers-exchanges-state cycle can be modified to improve the consequences. With an illustrative scheme that summarises the framework, the manuscript can be closed.

I emphasise that it is not about generating more results or processing more information. It is about better ordering and exploiting the information they already have and thus avoiding speculative approaches. The authors will note that the problem addressed is what other authors have called "Coastal squeeze".

Some minor changes and suggestions:

47. a) Ln 47. I think the authors should change "impacts" to "consequences".
48. b) S. salsa is sometimes written in italics and sometimes not.
49. c) Figure 1 is missing legends. It would be good to check that all locality names mentioned in the manuscript are on this map.
50. d) Ln 231-232. I suggest explaining the cascading processes that occur with land use changes in the study area.
51. e) Ln 232. What are the natural changes you allude to, and what evidence do you have of these changes?

References:

Silva, R., Martínez, M. L., Van Tussenbroek, B. I., Guzmán-Rodríguez, L. O., Mendoza, E., and López-Portillo, J. (2020). A Framework to manage coastal squeeze. Sustainability 12:10610. doi: 10.3390/su122410610

Author Response

we would like to thank the reviewer for these constructive comments. We agree with your suggestion on the DESCR conceptual framework. We have revised the manuscript basing on your comments and have cited Silva, et al., (2020). We found our conceptual framework is much similar to the work in Silva, et al., (2020), and therefore did not make a repeated framework given the limited space for the manuscript. We hope this satisfies the concerns made and welcome any further suggestions that may improve the conceptual framework.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

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.