Spatial-Temporal Process of Land Use/Land Cover and Desertification in the Circum-Tarim Basin during 1990–2020

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an interesting manuscript on the impact of land use / land cover changes on desertification over three decades in the Circum Tarim Basin. The scientific approach is conventional but sound, and the study area is most interesting both for its history and for being a large benchmark for desertification approaches throughout the world. I have certainly read it to learn about the subject.

The study is well presented and almost ready for publication. I have not found any scientific flaw requiring data to be re-analyzed or results to be re-interpreted. However, it has some issues in its present form that I would suggest to correct.

In general, the methods description should be enhanced. I found certain details such as weight allocation to be too implicit and difficult to replicate. The desertification categories names are rather awkward. Another aspect to improve concerns the conclusions, which are fine in this version but should be more tightly linked to the results. Further, I missed both a self assesment of the study and a generalization of the approach so that it could be replicated elsewhere. Finally, it is at least odd that the cited references are almost exclusively Chinese, implicitly suggesting that neither the approach nor the underlying concepts or methods have any precedent anywhere else in the World.

These points, along with more detailed and specific comments listed below, justifies my recommendation of accepting this study after a minor revision.

Specific comments by lines:

19: Please define the type of desertification you address very briefly.

21: 'Region' in this context refers to a zone with consistent results in your study, not to an administrative delineation. The wording has some confusion to this respect.

23: It is unclear what you mean by 'stable', as it is used in conjunction with 'developed', 'reversed' or 'increasing'. This phrase in particular seems like an intrinsic contradiction.

25: Tautological: if severe desertification has increased, it is certainly the area where desertification intensifies. Please correct according to what you meant.

27: What follows looks like a policy summary, but it does not seem to have a direct linkage with this study. Please provide such relationship or delete those general recommendations.

41: Desertification should be clearly defined early in this manuscript. The abstract correctly puts it in the frane of human activities. However, the description of Xinjiang here speaks mostly of deserts, and manages desertification and deserts interchangeably. I cannot agree. Deserts are natural systems, while desertified areas are human-degraded systems. While deserts can be desertified, desertification and deserts are not the same thing. The text that follows very correctly treats these concepts applied to the Tarim Basin, but they should be clarified in this paragraph too.

114: It might be useful, but not critical, that these rivers were shown in Fig. 1.

118: Please mention the reference system in the map caption, including EPSG code if applicable.

127: 'Unfinished forest'. This sounds odd. Please use a more descriptive adjective.

143: Please define what concrete attributes, as interpreted from these images, were used to determine the degree of desertification. If appropriate, refer to the description in Section 2.3.1.

147: Please mention the reference system in the map caption, including EPSG code if applicable.

148: An overview of how the different datasets were used wuld be useful. For example, the dron images were used to validate Landsat classifications, which in turn served to provide the LULC data set with biophysical attributes. Something short that helps the reader to have an idea of the whole study before entering into details.

159: Please describe with more detail how the judgment matrix was built and how the weights were set through consistency testing. This is critical for the reader to correctly understand your study.

162: Does 'standardizing' refer to transforming the data into standard deviation units, or to something else? Please clarify.

182: Of course authors' decision concerning these names prevails, but for an external reader like me, they are confusing. 'Development' does not seem a lighter stage of 'Reversal' which, by the way, suggests that desertification has reverted rather than become severe. Why not using 'light' and 'severe', as yourselves apply in the description? Further, 'Undesertification' is not a particularly pretty name and suggests, again, that the concerned land has been previously desertified. I strongly suggest that you reconsider such names.

189: Not indispensable, but a contingency table would illustrate better this zoning.

190: The presentation of results is too long. The flood of numbers and percentages makes it difficult to follow. Moreover, the information is mostly descriptive and prone to saturate the reader. I suggest to move the results to an appendix, and leave for this text section just what will be relevant in the Discussion. Depending on the Editor's preferences, the section could even be compacted in a combined Results and Discussion, as long as the results are available in an appendix.

432: The idea is clear to me, but please, rephrase.

439: This is a good place to describe the main LULC changes conducive to desertification. Be aware that this is the core result of your study, and its details will attract the interest of international scientists.

463: 'desertification and desertification'?

478: This is very encouraging. A mention to the type of vegetation involved in such increase of cover, including whether it is starting a secondary ecological succession, would be appreciated. As it would be a comment on whether the restored vegetation is resilient beyond human care.

484: Understanding that it is perhaps beyond the scope of this study, I wonder how do overlay those afforestation and restoration projects on your LULC change results. Perhaps you could mention it as a future line of research.

497: As Region I and II have just been mentioned, the reader would expect that the activities that follow were explicitly assigned to them, as well as to the secondary areas. Otherwise such activities become just generic. recommendations out of scope.

503: Please .try to be more specific with the conclusions. Bear in mind that the conclusions must make all the study necessary. In its current form, the conclusions are too general and could have been written right at the start, rather than at the end, of the study.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The manuscript should be proof-read by a qualified English speaker before publishing. While it is well written overall and I had no problems to understand it, there are many issues of style and wording that should be addressed.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your insightful and valuable feedback on my manuscript amidst your busy schedule. I have carefully responded to every one of the suggestions, and the specific modifications can be found in the manuscript and the revision instructions below. I would like to provide a brief description of the points you have raised.

(1) Based on the issue of limited references you raised, the author conducted another literature review during the revision process, citing a total of 69 references to introduce the research background and methods. The abstract, introduction, methods, discussion, and conclusion were updated and revised accordingly.

(2)In response to your issue of excessively long display of results, the author has condensed and summarized the results, removing unnecessary text and charts.

(3) Regarding the two discussion questions you raised, which the author considers very valuable and needs to focus on in future research, the author has already expressed their views on these two issues in the discussion section.

(3) Regarding grammar and spelling errors, the author invites professionals from MDPI to proofread the manuscript and carefully check for the aforementioned errors.

Thank you again for your efforts and assistance.

Best regards,

 

Xiaoming Cao

9/5/2024

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This research focuses on an analysis of desertification in the Tarim Basin.  It focuses on the past 30 years of land use/land cover (LULC) changes and their relationship with desertification occurrence and development. The approach used is interesting and methods section provides an explanation of data sources and collection, processing techniques and desertification classification methodology. Such explanation of methodology ensures transparency and reproducibility. In this context, I am absolutely excited to learn from this article the detrimental impact of artificial oases expansion and irrational water use on desertification and vegetation health, and the positive effects of ecological protection projects and vegetation restoration measures in mitigating desertification. However, I have some suggestions to further improve the manuscript:

- The introduction could be improved to better contextualize the theme by using recent and well-chosen bibliographical references.

- Although I am not qualified to assess the quality of English, I did notice some spelling and syntax errors and several formulations in the text need improvement. For example: The title: Spatial-temporal .......Basin from during 1990-2020 (Also, Avoid abbreviations in the title).

(L229) The composition and changes of area proportion of LUCC during 1990-2020.

Several spelling mistakes were found (subsequednt; couldb; utiliztion......................)

L127 and L227: Abbreviation LULC not LUCC

- Punctuation rules must be respected in several passages: no space before, and a space after: full stop, comma, closing parenthesis, etc. Below are some but it's general throughout the manuscript.

L65 :（Zhu,1985; Zu et al., 2001).In recent decades, factors

L70 region(Zheng et al., 2020   L82 : desert(Yu et al., 2022),   L87 : 1991).Therefore  …. Etc.

L139 : spacing(Figure 2.).

L125: full stop at the end of the sentence. The data classification description is in Table.1.

- The quality of all the figures needs to be improved. The grids and map legends are difficult to read. Graph legends are also sometimes difficult to read.

- The legends of some figures need to be improved. Fig 5 and Fig 6 show several combined graphs. The legend should therefore also show them.

- Figures should be inserted at manuscript level after citing them in the text. L278 this section begins with a figure (Figure 9)? whereas the reference to the figure is made afterwards (at L 293). Figure 13 is also inserted (L392) before reference L398. The same observation to Figure 8 (L269 and L271). The reference to figure 12 is also missing.

- Avoid using Figure 15 in the discussion. Use only the reference of the work.

- Avoid using non-standard abbreviations without a description. UAV: write the abbreviation in full when it first appears,

- L150 and L167 the title of the sub-section can be deleted.

 

- Overlap between methods and results.

Results included in the methods section (L233) : There was no significant difference between the area of transferred in and out in woodland, water area, and unused land. (Also, the significance of the changes is only mentioned in the case of carrying out a statistical test, otherwise the quality cannot be judged)..

And methods inserted in the Results section (L253): In order to clarify the spatial characteristics of LULC changes from 1990, the study defined an area where a certain LULC type had no change in 6 periods as an unchanged region(Region I), otherwise it was defined as a changed region (Region II)

- L171-L174: present results in the Methods section.

- L189 : It is a table, not a Figure.  Also correct at L188 (Table 2 instead of Figure 3)

 

- The word ‘Region’ is used to distinguish between spatial characteristics of LULC changes (L 254) unchanged region (Region I), otherwise changed region (Region II). ‘Region’ has also been adopted in Zoning standards for desertification. Different words should therefore be used to avoid ambiguity for the reader (e.g. Area instead of Region in Zoning standards for desertification).

- The discussion can be enhanced mainly by developing a section dealing with the implications for the management of this area….

- The bibliography: The document relies on a limited bibliography for a dynamic topic. The number of cited works remains low, despite the availability of recent studies and references that could enrich the various aspects of the article. Therefore, it is imperative to incorporate more recent bibliographic references to provide better context for the topic and to facilitate a more comprehensive discussion of the results.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

- Although I am not qualified to assess the quality of English, I did notice some spelling and syntax errors and several formulations in the text need improvement. For example: The title: Spatial-temporal .......Basin from during 1990-2020.

Several spelling mistakes were found (subsequednt; couldb; utiliztion......................)

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your insightful and valuable feedback on my manuscript amidst your busy schedule. I have carefully responded to every one of the suggestions, and the specific modifications can be found in the manuscript and the revision instructions below. I would like to provide a brief description of the points you have raised.

(1) Based on the issue of limited references you raised, the author conducted another literature review during the revision process, citing a total of 69 references to introduce the research background and methods. The abstract, introduction, methods, discussion, and conclusion were updated and revised accordingly.

(2) Regarding the issue of unclear legends: The author has redrawn all the figures in the text, enlarged the legends, and checked the order and citation positions of all the figures one by one.

(3) Regarding grammar and spelling errors, the author invites professionals from MDPI to proofread the manuscript and carefully check for the aforementioned errors.

Thank you again for your efforts and assistance.

Best regards,

 

Xiaoming Cao

9/5/2024

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf