Spatio-Temporal Features and Influencing Factors of Homesteads Expansion at Village Scale
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper aims to explore the evolution of homesteads expansion and its influencing factors between 2010-2020 in the context of six villages in Deqing County in China. While the paper presents interesting empirical data, there are some major issues that are required to be addressed.
General comments
1- you need to further justify the importance of your study. At the moment, you say "Mastering the evolution of homesteads expansion and its influencing factors is of great significance for homesteads reform and optimization of the layout." Why? Just saying it is important isn’t enough. You need to appropriately justify your study.
2- I have concerns regarding the generalisability of your findings. You have only studied 6 villages, but you claim that your “results can provide scientific references for rural planning.” This is a tiny sample in the scale of China. How your findings can be ‘scientific’. How generalisable your findings are to other cases? I believe I will need to study many more case studies to be able to make any claims / real contribution to the knowledge. At the moment, this is not the case.
3- the context of many of your statements isn’t clear. When you are talking about urbanisation, what context do you have in mind. It seems that your paper is entirely focused on China, and it ignore the international context. How are your study / findings of interest to your international readers?
4- you need to entirely rewrite your abstract. You need to include the major aspects of the entire paper in a prescribed sequence that includes: 1) the overall purpose of the study and the research problem(s) you investigated; 2) the basic design of the study; 3) major findings or trends found as a result of your analysis; and, 4) a brief summary of your interpretations and conclusions. At the moment, some of these aspects are missing.
5- In the introduction, make clearer what knowledge gaps you identified and how your research addresses them. Also, make the research objectives/questions clearer. Answer the “so what?” question. Why investigating such matter is important? End the introduction with an outline of the paper; what comes next?
6- The novelty/originality should be clearly justified that the manuscript contains sufficient contributions to the new body of knowledge from the international perspective. What new things (new theories, new methods, or new policies) can the paper contribute to the existing international literature? This point must be reasonably justified by a Literature Review, clearly introduced in Introduction Section, and completely discussed in Discussion Section.
7- You have not sufficiently engaged with the existing literature on this topic. You need a new section on literature review. You need to acknowledge the existing literature on the issue and clearly identify the knowledge gap.
8- you need a new section in the methodology section and present the limitations of your study.
10- in a paper that uses quantitative methodology, you must have two separate sections for ‘results’ and ‘discussions’. The results section simply and objectively reports what you found, without speculating on why you found these results. The discussion interprets the meaning of the results, puts them in context, and explains why they matter.
11- why have you started your conclusion section with Deqing County? The function of your paper's conclusion is to restate the main argument. It reminds the reader of the strengths of your main argument(s) and reiterates the most important evidence supporting those argument(s). I believe your case studies aren’t the main part of your key arguments.
12- there are several writing issues and your sentences are not always clear. I have listed some of them in the ‘specific comments’, but please note that these are indicative and not exhaustive.
Specific comments:
Line 13: what do you mean by ‘mastering’ the evolution of…
14: what is it ‘of great significance’?
15-16: you need to justify why you conducted this research. What do we know about this topic and what knowledge gaps you have identified.
21-22: “The research results can provide scientific references for rural planning.” Again, just saying this is not enough. What are these references? What are your key conclusions?
27: what is the reference?
28: what do you mean by ‘welfare security function’?
29: ‘a pivotal position’ in what?
30: 'resulting in a shortage of land for urban construction' is this important to be mentioned here? Is this part of the arguments of the paper?
32: phenomena or phenomenon?
33: ‘in some places’ in what places?
33-34: what do you mean by 'the expansion of homesteads is not conducive to the protection of cultivated land'? explain a bit more.
35: 'an important task for new rural construction' – task for whom? What is new rural construction?
36: ‘problems existing in the evolution of rural homesteads’ what does this mean? Problems in the evolution?
37: 'grasp the characteristics of homesteads' what does this mean? grasp isn't the right word here.
39-40: quotations need page numbers.
41: ‘reform measures in recent years’. What are these reforms? You need to provide more information.
42-43: 'Therefore, it is important to study the temporal and spatial evolution characteristics of homesteads and their influencing factors in this context.' Again, just saying this is important is not enough. Why is it important?
48: what do you mean by ‘spatially heterogeneous’. Elaborate more on this.
51: what do you mean by 'at the level of the homesteads patch'. This is not clear.
54: 'the resolution is too low' - the resolution of what? Do you mean satellite images? What satellite images exactly? Clarify.
47-61: are these in the context of China? Surely, you cannot say this is the case in the entire world. Be more specific.
62: what is the convex hull model?
63: ‘the newly land and the convex hull.’ What do you mean by newly land?
72-74: 'Deqing County,..., has reference significance for other regions' Again, why? How?
76: why only 6 samples? You’re doing a quantitative analysis. Is this number of samples enough to make a meaningful statistical analysis?
82: ‘This study aims to provide a scientific basis for homesteads reform and rural planning in China.’ What is this 'scientific basis'? This is vague. Provide more information.
89: ‘the top 100 counties in the country for many years’. This is too vague. When? Provide reliable statistic.
110: how did you use the data from Google Earth? How reliable and accurate these data are?
121: what do you mean by ‘Technology roadmap’?
131: what is the reference of this formula and others?
233: Table 1. What does the slope aspect show? What are these figures?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The abstract is extremely concise, being more informative than descriptive. This is not a minus, but it is necessary for the authors should provide a broad overview of the matter under discussion in one or two sentences at the top. Also, at the end it should discuss a little (one sentence) the implications of the research. The authors have added a sentence in this sense, but it is very general, it does not refer to the research findings of this work.
The Introduction is limited to Chinese literature and the presentation of the chosen topic is made in the context of the works that were written with reference to the Chinese territory. However, even if most of the works that focus on homesteads refer to rural China, there are still a number of works that focus on other countries that could be used by the authors in presenting the significance of the topic and the available literature associated with the topic.
From lines 62 to 83, the authors present mixed objectives and hypotheses, but also the study area. It would be useful to clearly present the paper's objectives and hypotheses. The information regarding the study area could be added to 2.1.1 Research Area Selection and Overview. Also, the authors could add some more information about the relevant socio-economic and demographic characteristics of the study area.
The Data Sources and the Research Method are clearly and comprehensively presented.
The Results are also presented in a comprehensive manner.
The Discussions should be placed before the Conclusions. At the same time, the Discussions should analyze the current results in a wider context, in relation to other similar works or with works that have dealt with similar subjects.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for addressing my comments. The discussion section can still be further elaborated.
Author Response
Thank you for your valuable and thoughtful comments, we have carefully checked and revised the manuscript. Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
