History of Land Cover Change on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It is an interesting article on the dynamics of land cover, being suggestively highlighted their analyses and perspective.

The workflow is not original, but it treats an atypical area of interest. As an observation, at the current stage it would have been good to mention the fact that there is a geo-portal at European level, that provides open data on this dynamics in the urban environment (https://land.copernicus.eu/), as well as other examples of geo-portals in the USA. I think the subject is to be of interest as relevance, the way of realization and presentation being appreciated.

The bibliographic references are of high quality, recent, thus the content of the work being correctly based and related to the level of research in the present.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The study was carried out for a very interesting area. The nature of the Galapagos Islands is a world-class value. Anthropogenic influence on the nature of the islands should be subjected to comprehensive study. The authors have carried out important research in this direction.

A detailed and qualitative description of the study area is given. The data used and their processing are described in detail. The authors used effective and modern methods. These methods are fully consistent with the tasks. Articles have a clear and logical structure. The methodology can be reproduced at the discretion of the authors.

The article is well illustrated. All cards are of good quality. They are properly framed. Small details on the maps are well read. The statistical graphs are also of high quality. Modern approaches to visualization of the results of statistical analysis are used. Figure 8 is especially interesting. The combination of violin plots and boxplots is a very successful and beautiful solution.

The results and conclusions obtained are beyond doubt. The article may be published after minor edits.

 

There are the following remarks about the work:

1) I advise you to read the article, perhaps it will be useful in the introduction and discussion:

Barreto-Álvarez, D. E., Heredia-Rengifo, M. G., Padilla-Almeida, O., & Toulkeridis, T. (2020, November). Multitemporal evaluation of the recent land use change in Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos, Ecuador. In Conference on Information and Communication Technologies of Ecuador (pp. 519-534). Springer, Cham.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Deniz-Barreto-2/publication/346266230_Multitemporal_Evaluation_of_the_Recent_Land_Use_Change_in_Santa_Cruz_Island_Galapagos_Ecuador/links/622ad8e89f7b324634209903/Multitemporal-Evaluation-of-the-Recent-Land-Use-Change-in-Santa-Cruz-Island-Galapagos-Ecuador.pdf

2) In subsection 2.2, you mention ArcGIS 10.5 (line 182) and ArcGIS 10.6 (line 197). Did you really use two different versions or is there a typo somewhere?

3) The statistical software used should be more accurately described. To do this, please specify the version number R and the version number of the PMCMRplus package. This is important for the reproducibility of the statistical analysis technique.

4) When you describe methods of statistical analysis, please indicate not only the packages but also the used functions of the R language.

5) It is not entirely clear what is meant by ANOVA. You use nonparametric methods for correlation analysis and for post hoc comparisons. But after reading ANOVA, the reader can understand this as Fisher's parametric analysis of variance (aov function in R). But judging by the appendix, you did not use this method. Maybe it was the Kruskal-Wallis test? Please clarify this question.

6) In figures 4, 5 and 8, the letter designating parts of the figure is not explained in the caption under the figure. Explain this in the captions under the figures. This can be done in a little more detail than in the labels for the Y axes (full name instead of abbreviation, indicate the units of measurement).

7) In subsection 3.1 please write how the sites with invasive species appeared. Were these artificial plantings of invasive species? Or did the invasive species spread independently and form forests/groves on separate parts of the island?

8) Line 331-332. You write about concerns about the expansion of invasive species in non-protected area. Probably invasive species can also settle in a protected area. I think it should be mentioned in the text that there is such a danger.

9) Subsection heading 2.4 - remove bold type. Leave only italics, as in the headings of the remaining subsections.

10) Line 490 - Replace the comma with a dot after the number 2.

11) Line 191-192. By minimum unit do you mean the spatial resolution of the rasters (100 m/pixel)?

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The idea behind the manuscript is good. I don't have objections on that and on the general structure and content of the paper. What I can note, instead, is that the authors should revise extensively the manuscript trying to better reflect on the fact that the article is very applied at now, and not completely novel as far as the theoretical and methodological contribution to land-use change. In other words, it is a very applied contribution, descriptive and exploratory. I would see a completely different content, trying to explicate why the article is novel, for an  international audience and for a top journal like Land. The fact that you are investigating a not well covered area is alone not enough to justify publication! Thank you.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The article is analyzing history of Santa Cruz Island in Galapagos from year 1961 to 2018. It is based on agricultural, socioeconomic and tourism sectors and their influence on land cover.

The article is well written and concise, but there are still some concerns.

Source of land cover information is showed in Table 2, but there is no analysis of how different classification from different sources (areal images of different spectral and spatial resolutions) influence those changes. For example - land cover map in 2018 is much more noisy and granular than those from 2012 and 2007?

Discussion section (and table 4) - Why is there such dramatic increase of Invasive species expansion in such short period of time from 2012 - 2018 (12.9)? It is similar to 1985-2007 (18.8); and in 2007-2012 it is only about 2%?

Table 2 -What is the metrics of this resolution?

Line 246 - Above you mentioned that INEC stands for "Ecuadorian Institute of Statistics and Census" and here you said "National Institute of Statistics and Census" - which is correct

Line 283 - Why Spearman's and not Pearson's correlation?

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

The article is much better and more concise.

I presume that "Lines 563-619" are mistake and should be deleted?