Land Preservation Uptakes in the Escarpments of North-Eastern Ethiopia: Drivers, Sustainability, and Constraints
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This study is interesting. The authors assessed the sustainability, drivers, and constraints of the soil and water preserving practices in Dessie Zuria and Kutaber Woredas of South Wollo by questionnaire survey. The Logic of the paper is reasonable and the expression is clear. Here I have some suggestions.
1. this manuscript is very long, which I think will discourage reading. Some subsections in literature review and results can be moved to appendix.
2. line 385, table 2 list how the authors label independent variables, but how you classified them. For instance, for wealth group, how you classified poor, middle and rich?
3. line 457, are you sure in table 4? I did not find 3 categories of sustainability in table 4.
4. line 470, I am still not sure how many samples have you collected to measure sustainability. The total number of respondents who perceive the existence of land degradation is 345, while 286+23+12=321. Is that mean only 23 samples and 12 samples were collected to study sustainability of biological and mixed methods?
5. line 545, are you sure in table 5?
6. line 564, punctuation error.
7. In figure 7, there is a great difference between preference score of different SWCPs. Is this influenced by respondents count?
8. The authors should remove section 7: further research.
9. Arable land quality and intensive arable land use is also important for soil and water conservation. Some researches may provide you some inspiration : https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1106049; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2021.107757.
Author Response
Dear anonymous reviewer,
We thank you for taking the time to assess our manuscript and for your comments and suggestions, which allow us to improve the paper. We update the manuscript in response to your questions and recommendations. Hereby are a point-by-point response to the issues you raised:
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
I appreciate case-study presentation since they allow us to understand wether theoretically models are confirmed and have a practical significance in improving people wellbeing.
Nevertheless, I think that your paper should be restructured to make it shorter (please, try to avoid to repeat concepts or information) and more to the point, beginning from the abstract that does not meet author instructions as regards its maximum length.
I would advise restructuring literature reviews citing more updated and "general" references (land degradation is not a problem only for African countries, as well as sustainability issues) and than to concentrate on "more local" literature, stressing - if it is the case - differences in drivers and issues. A short definition (or references) about sustainability and - mostly - of sustainability rate and its estimation could be useful.
The methodological part should benefit from a table/graphic model/flow chart linking all the activities you have done (questionnaires, focus groups, transects, etc.) with the info that they allow to gather, how they have been used and for which aim.
Please, make sure that from the text it is easy to understand what measures, schemes and practices are, and in which relation they are.
Please, consider anticipating in the case-study description some of the info about land property (public) and the chance for the head of the family to transmit it, otherwise issues such as lack of tenure security and fragmentation due to the transmission to the next generation seems to be in contrast and are not easy to be understood from a reader who does not know your specific situation. The same with "physical measure" (page 21) whose description may be anticipated to the methodological part in order to make result discussion easier to be understood.
Besides, I wonder if you have for your country data on demographic and socio-economic characteristics of farming households and their heads. In this case, data on table 3 should be more interpreted as "sample" features to consider for understanding their significance for the universe of households, more than results of the research. Besides, it should be important to know how many households' heads there are in the case-study area in order to understand the share covered by the 402 interviews.
Last but not least, the assessment of sustainability is calculated on the basis of respondents' opinion, and consequently it is more a "perception" of the level of sustainability attainable/attained than an "objective" measure of it. Although household-head's opinion is paramount for acceptability and chance of these practices to be adopted, a proper measure of sustainability - if not based on objective data - could be better assessed by experts' opinion, or at least need to be confronted with it.
Table 6. The caption says it reports the correlation between household variables and physical practices, and this is repeated also in rows 805-806. However, table 6 columns represent ecological, economic and social sustainability and not physical practices, while preferences for various SWCPs (but not in relation to household variables) are given in figure 7. Please, give reason for the table title or change it, and in the case specify if sustainability correlation with household variables refers only to cases where physical measures were adopted.
Author Response
Dear anonymous reviewer,
We thank you for taking the time to assess our manuscript and for your comments and suggestions, which allow us to improve the paper. We update the manuscript in response to your questions and recommendations. Here are a point-by-point response to the issues you raised:
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Dear Authors
Please find my point of view in the attached file.
Best wishes
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear anonymous reviewer,
We thank you for taking the time to assess our manuscript and for your comments and suggestions, which allow us to improve the paper. We update the manuscript in response to your questions and recommendations. Hereby are a point-by-point response to the issues you raised:
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
I have appreciated the time and effort the Authors spent in improving their paper.
Nevertheless, some further effort is needed for improving the language, especially of the modified or added parts, where there are typing mistakes (word missing or misspelled) and other mistakes. Some statements would profit by rephrasing or checking, e.g. in table 5 change "economical sustainability" to "economic sustainability", in row 431 change "physical measures" to "biological measures", row 576 change "rodents and other birds" to "rodents and birds". Row 584 "they remain unfeasible and fail to bring unintended results" was perfectly understandable to me in its previous version, while now - after adding "fail to" it puzzles me.
While I appreciate the introduction of figure 2, in its present form it is not readable. Please take out the white bands above and below the picture and enlarge it at the maximum page width in order to make it readable. The introduction of Figure 2 caused some problems in the numbering and citing of figures, e.g. in row 376 is cited figure 3 instead of figure 4; in row 395, cite figure 5, 6 &7; in row 399 is cited figure 4 instead of figure 5; in row 435 is cited figure 5 instead of figure 6; in row 601 is cited figure 8 instead of figure 9. In row 637 is cited figure 10.b instead of figure 11.b. PLEASE CHECK ALL THE NUMBERING AND RELATED CITATIONS IN THE TEXT.
Besides, as regards figure 8 a legend explaining the meaning of acronyms is missing. Although it is not formally the best solution, if you have problems in adding a legend to the figure, you may put it after the title, so that you do not have to change it or you could at least put the acronyms of the cited measures in the text discussing them, e.g. in rows 500-501 to change "stone face bunds" into "stone face bunds (SFB)"
As regards tables
Table 1 is put at the beginning of the subsection (pp 5-6) but is cited only in page 8. Please consider citing it earlier at the beginning of the subsection (when you cite some of the info reported in the table) or move it later on in the paper. Besides, since land tenure insecurity is one of the main issues described in the paper, I would comment the fact that table 1 states that land is publicly owned saying that this aspect will be better described and discussed in sections XX and XX.
Table 6. I still cannot understand the title. Could it be possible that table 6 describes the "Correlation between household variables and the sustainability of physical practices" rather than the "Correlation between household variables and physical practices"? If this is the case, please change accordingly also rows 727-728
Besides:
row 408. In my opinion you put again che sum of economic indicators rather than that of social indicators. The average value is correct.
row 764. mekuriaw should be with the first letter in capital "Mekuriaw". Please, check the related reference because in the reference list Mekuriaw is [15] and not [24]. In the case that Mekuriaw is cited in some other authors' paper, please makes it explicit.
row 835. I am not sure I have understood what you mean. If the legislation is already rigid, why there is the need to further strengthen it? Maybe I would have used a different verb such us "modify" or "improve".
Please make sure that repetitions of results in the discussion section is limited to what it is necessary for further discussion, without simply repeating the information
Author Response
Dear anonymised reviewer,
Thank you for the time and effort devoted to improving the content of our manuscript. Kindly find our reflection, in red, addressed points by point in the attachment.
Regards,
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.
