Harmonized Pan-European Time Series for Monitoring Soil Sealing

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Please see document attached. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Ms. Hermione Zhang  (Section Managing Editor)

As the reviewer of the paper with ID land-3058171 and title “Harmonized Pan European time series for monitoring soil sealing” I have carefully reviewed the paper.

This article, which is a product of the European Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), which is available as open access and provides European-scale data, and the production of a harmonized continental-scale soil sealing dataset, is technically well-written and fits the scope of the journal and the "Urban Contexts and Urban-Rural Interactions" section to which it was submitted.

The article presents scientific advances in the methodological part of a generated dataset. It is considered worthy of publication in its current form. However, I would like to report some very minor corrections.

Firstly, Abstract does not contain any quantitative information. This needs to be improved.

In the introduction, lines 31-37 revolve around the point that the concepts of imperviousness and Soil sealing are confused. Is there a special need to start the article in this way?

Line 42-45, what are the exemplary organisations promoting ? Here it is necessary to report official references.

Line 56: You have not defined the EEA before. Be careful not to use an abbreviation without defining it.

The paper should be structured to include a paragraph on soil sealing in the introduction on soil mission, which has been discussed in the European Commission in the last months.https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/proposal-directive-soil-monitoring-and-resilience_en

The word “sealing” appears 18 times in the file titled "Sealing", but your article does not refer to this directive proposal for a DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on Soil Monitoring and Resilience_COM_2023_416_final and ANNEXES

The article has difficulty in identifying a gap in the existing literature. Was the CLMS product soil sealing data missing? Why did you decide to obtain a harmozie product?

Methods

When making a class-specific comparison, it is surprising to see the performance measures MAE and RMSE, which are often used in regression problems. What exactly do the terms mi and ri refer to here and do they represent a class or a continuous data type?

Findings are presented clearly.

There seems to be no external access to the EEA geospatial data catalogue. It seems difficult to access the data.

Sincerely

Author Response

COMMENT 1:This article, which is a product of the European Copernicus Land Monitoring Service (CLMS), which is available as open access and provides European-scale data, and the production of a harmonized continental-scale soil sealing dataset, is technically well-written and fits the scope of the journal and the "Urban Contexts and Urban-Rural Interactions" section to which it was submitted.

The article presents scientific advances in the methodological part of a generated dataset. It is considered worthy of publication in its current form. However, I would like to report some very minor corrections.

RESPONSE: The Authors wish to thank the reviewer for taking the time to review the manuscript and his assessment.

COMMENT 2: Firstly, Abstract does not contain any quantitative information. This needs to be improved.

RESPONSE: A statement was added summarizing the results obtained.

COMMENT 3: In the introduction, lines 31-37 revolve around the point that the concepts of imperviousness and Soil sealing are confused. Is there a special need to start the article in this way?

RESPONSE: This is indeed required because the two concepts are often used interchangeably, but represent different concepts.: imperviousness can be anthropogenic or not whereas sealing is an anthropogenic process. Imperviousness can be assessed from satellite imagery, but sealing is what needs to be monitored from a policy perspective hence the discussion in the introduction.

COMMENT 4: Line 42-45, what are the exemplary organisations promoting ? Here it is necessary to report official references.

RESPONSE: A reference on the new soil monitoring law was added with additional explanation at the end of the paragraph.

COMMENT 5: Line 56: You have not defined the EEA before. Be careful not to use an abbreviation without defining it.

RESPONSE: This has now been corrected

COMMENT 6: The paper should be structured to include a paragraph on soil sealing in the introduction on soil mission, which has been discussed in the European Commission in the last months.https://environment.ec.europa.eu/publications/proposal-directive-soil-monitoring-and-resilience_en

RESPONSE: We mentioned the mission on soil in the second paragraph on the introduction

COMMENT 7: The word “sealing” appears 18 times in the file titled "Sealing", but your article does not refer to this directive proposal for a DIRECTIVE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT AND OF THE COUNCIL on Soil Monitoring and Resilience_COM_2023_416_final and ANNEXES

RESPONSE: We now included a citation to the European Commission’s proposal for a soil monitoring law.

COMMENT 8: The article has difficulty in identifying a gap in the existing literature. Was the CLMS product soil sealing data missing? Why did you decide to obtain a harmonize product?

RESPONSE: As mentioned in the introduction in Line 50-67, the CLMS Imperviousness degree is the only dataset available that can be used to monitor soil sealing consistently at European scale. GHSL and WSF are alternative global sources, but were not specifically designed to monitor sealed areas, but rather built-up areas. The main reason for developing a harmonized product is related to the change of resolution introduced from 2018 which led to a huge difference in the areas mapped as impervious. The main reason for the paper is therefore to develop an approach to ensure that (i) the areas mapped as impervious consider the most detailed resolution available and (ii) that changes are consistent through time

COMMENT 9: When making a class-specific comparison, it is surprising to see the performance measures MAE and RMSE, which are often used in regression problems. What exactly do the terms mi and ri refer to here and do they represent a class or a continuous data type?

RESPONSE: The issue is actually a regression problem as the Imperviousness degree data is continuous and compared with reference sampled observation for which the data is also presented as proportions. mi and ri are introduced in Line 303-304 of the manuscript and are respectively the map layer and reference data observation of imperviousness degree expressed as a proportion for paired sample locations.

COMMENT 10: Findings are presented clearly.

RESPONSE: The authors thank the reviewer for his evaluation

COMMENT 11: There seems to be no external access to the EEA geospatial data catalogue. It seems difficult to access the data.

RESPONSE: The permanent link to access the data was provided: https://sdi.eea.europa.eu/catalogue/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/7db5272f-5825-442b-9fa0-8b1c424f4ff1, it is not yet active , but will be very soon.

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper presents authors’ research on harmonization of large-area TS soil sealing information product. It is well written, applying methodology well established yet adapted to the data and practicalities. I would like to give it my strong recommendation. Perhaps, authors may consider improving it further, attending to the following points.

I wonder if change of spatial support may also be explored from a modeling approach in addition to what was already implemented in the research.

Second, time makes the story interesting yet tends to make modeling and analyses more complicated. Authors might have already described it to some extent in the paper but I would appreciate whether change detection should be carried out to better map spatialized changes and then correct any bias using a design-based inference as in the paper.  

Stratification is mentioned in the paper. I wonder whether it would be sensible to use a stratification that is not dependent on a particular datasets or map coverages. Maybe, what was implemented in the research was already a well thought strategy.

 

Author Response

COMMENT 1: This paper presents authors’ research on harmonization of large-area TS soil sealing information product. It is well written, applying methodology well established yet adapted to the data and practicalities. I would like to give it my strong recommendation. Perhaps, authors may consider improving it further, attending to the following points.

RESPONSE: The Authors wish to thank the reviewer for taking the time to review this manuscript and his assessment.

COMMENT 2: I wonder if change of spatial support may also be explored from a modeling approach in addition to what was already implemented in the research.

RESPONSE: This aspect was not specifically researched for the purpose of this study and the level of spatial support selected was designed to provide the best compromise between the effort required to collect reference observation and the total number of observations. However, further research could focus on this issue.

COMMENT 3: Second, time makes the story interesting yet tends to make modeling and analyses more complicated. Authors might have already described it to some extent in the paper but I would appreciate whether change detection should be carried out to better map spatialized changes and then correct any bias using a design-based inference as in the paper. 

RESPONSE: Change detection was addressed in the paper and the approach used was described in Section 3.2.2. However, as indicated in the conclusions some recommendations are made to further improve this process by specifically targeting changes using machine learning.

COMMENT 4: Stratification is mentioned in the paper. I wonder whether it would be sensible to use a stratification that is not dependent on a particular datasets or map coverages. Maybe, what was implemented in the research was already a well thought strategy.

RESPONSE: As impervious areas represent a small proportion of the landscape and changes in impervious areas an even smaller proportion, stratification are indeed required and was applied. However, there could be further research in developing more

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Manuscript ID: land-3058171

Tittle: Harmonized Pan European time series for monitoring soil sealing

 

General comments:

The organizational structure and conclusions of current manuscript are more like data introductions than scientific research paper. The manuscript adopts the method of data fusion to study the temporal data of soil sealing in the European, and analyzes the reliability of the data. The manuscript lacks logical coherence in terms of data and method introduction, and needs some improvements. In the result part, a brief analysis was conducted on the accuracy of the data and its reliability in different domains. So the analysis still needs to be further strengthened. The lack of comparability between the data results and those of other international works hinders the widespread application of the data. Finally, since the work is focused on data products, it may be more suitable for publication in relevant journals related to remote sensing data analysis or data processing.

 

Detailed comments:

1. Line 30: In "1." The Introduction section will introduce the inversion of relevant data from other regions around the world;

2. Line 107: check "..";

3. Line 108: "2." The introduction of "Data" is quite confusing, with a focus on clearly introducing the data and sources used in this work. Important information such as data sources, spatiotemporal resolution, and years are presented in tables; Also, whether the data processing method should be placed in the data introduction section or the methods section, please unify;

4. Line 145: check "Figure 1Some of";

5. Line 212: check "See Error!"! Reference source not found.”;

6. The verification of fused data needs to be compared with the accuracy of other regions or the inversion results of data from different sources to determine the overall availability of the data;

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Manuscript ID: land-3058171

Tittle: Harmonized Pan European time series for monitoring soil sealing

 

General comments:

The organizational structure and conclusions of current manuscript are more like data introductions than scientific research paper. The manuscript adopts the method of data fusion to study the temporal data of soil sealing in the European, and analyzes the reliability of the data. The manuscript lacks logical coherence in terms of data and method introduction, and needs some improvements. In the result part, a brief analysis was conducted on the accuracy of the data and its reliability in different domains. So the analysis still needs to be further strengthened. The lack of comparability between the data results and those of other international works hinders the widespread application of the data. Finally, since the work is focused on data products, it may be more suitable for publication in relevant journals related to remote sensing data analysis or data processing.

 

Detailed comments:

1. Line 30: In "1." The Introduction section will introduce the inversion of relevant data from other regions around the world;

2. Line 107: check "..";

3. Line 108: "2." The introduction of "Data" is quite confusing, with a focus on clearly introducing the data and sources used in this work. Important information such as data sources, spatiotemporal resolution, and years are presented in tables; Also, whether the data processing method should be placed in the data introduction section or the methods section, please unify;

4. Line 145: check "Figure 1Some of";

5. Line 212: check "See Error!"! Reference source not found.”;

6. The verification of fused data needs to be compared with the accuracy of other regions or the inversion results of data from different sources to determine the overall availability of the data;

Author Response

COMMENT 1:

The organizational structure and conclusions of current manuscript are more like data introductions than scientific research paper. The manuscript adopts the method of data fusion to study the temporal data of soil sealing in the European, and analyzes the reliability of the data. The manuscript lacks logical coherence in terms of data and method introduction, and needs some improvements. In the result part, a brief analysis was conducted on the accuracy of the data and its reliability in different domains. So the analysis still needs to be further strengthened. The lack of comparability between the data results and those of other international works hinders the widespread application of the data. Finally, since the work is focused on data products, it may be more suitable for publication in relevant journals related to remote sensing data analysis or data processing.

RESPONSE:

The authors thank the reviewer for taking the time to review the paper but we disagree with the assessment, our paper focus on the development of a suitable approach to develop indicators of sealed areas that area spatially and temporally explicit. The paper is structured by (i) presenting how sealing is relevant to environmental monitoring and the EU policy framework, (ii) presenting relevant data sources (iii) the identified data sources are compared to available independent reference data to identify issues (iv) the main issues identified are the under estimation of sealed areas by the imperviousness degree layer and the discontinuity in the time series, (v) an approach is developed and implemented to address the issue and (vi) results show the impact of the approach implemented and (vii) conclusions and recommendations are made for future updates / improvements.

We feel Land is the correct journal because the focus is on developing methods for indicators generated from EO data products and less on how EO data products are produced.

COMMENT 2:

1. Line 30: In "1." The Introduction section will introduce the inversion of relevant data from other regions around the world;

RESPONSE:

The focus of the paper is specifically on Europe as a region of the world, but the approach presented could be applicable to other part of the world and global data sources are also presented.

COMMENT 3:

2. Line 107: check "..";

RESPONSE:

This has now been corrected

COMMENT 4:

3. Line 108: "2." The introduction of "Data" is quite confusing, with a focus on clearly introducing the data and sources used in this work. Important information such as data sources, spatiotemporal resolution, and years are presented in tables; Also, whether the data processing method should be placed in the data introduction section or the methods section, please unify;

RESPONSE:

The data processing and analysis should be presented in the method section as was done in the current version of the manuscript. The data section clearly focus on data already available and used as input to conduct the study.

COMMENT 4:

4. Line 145: check "Figure 1Some of";

RESPONSE:

This has been corrected

COMMENT 5:

5. Line 212: check "See Error!"! Reference source not found.”;

RESPONSE:

This has now been corrected

COMMENT 6:

6. The verification of fused data needs to be compared with the accuracy of other regions or the inversion results of data from different sources to determine the overall availability of the data;

RESPONSE:

As discussed there are no other data sources that are available at pan-European level to assess sealing level. The 2 most relevant data sources from their specifications and class definitions were indeed compared: the imperviousness degree layer and the CLC+ BackBone sealed class.

Round 2

Reviewer 4 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Manuscript ID: land-3058171-V2

Tittle: Harmonized Pan European time series for monitoring soil sealing

 

Comments:

The authors have made one-to-one responses to the review comments, and the quality of the manuscript has been improved.

However, there are still some minor errors in the text that need to be corrected.

Line 227: The abbreviations of the country names in the figure should correspond one-to-one with the content in the table. It is recommended to add abbreviations to the country names in the table as well;

Line 416: Verify the accuracy of the "300 by 300km" unit;

In addition, please authors to read the entire text to verify any minor errors in the text. The research conclusions and discussions need to be further strengthened. Please further refine the innovative points and main conclusions of the work.

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Manuscript ID: land-3058171-V2

Tittle: Harmonized Pan European time series for monitoring soil sealing

 

Comments:

The authors have made one-to-one responses to the review comments, and the quality of the manuscript has been improved.

However, there are still some minor errors in the text that need to be corrected.

Line 227: The abbreviations of the country names in the figure should correspond one-to-one with the content in the table. It is recommended to add abbreviations to the country names in the table as well;

Line 416: Verify the accuracy of the "300 by 300km" unit;

In addition, please authors to read the entire text to verify any minor errors in the text. The research conclusions and discussions need to be further strengthened. Please further refine the innovative points and main conclusions of the work.

Author Response

Comment 1: The authors have made one-to-one responses to the review comments, and the quality of the manuscript has been improved.

Response: the authors thank the reviewer for the time spent going through the revised manuscript and for providing additional comments

Comment 2: Line 227: The abbreviations of the country names in the figure should correspond one-to-one with the content in the table. It is recommended to add abbreviations to the country names in the table as well;

Response: This has now been addressed and the figure has been modified accordingly.

Comment 3: Line 416: Verify the accuracy of the "300 by 300km" unit;

Response: the authors confim the accuracy of the “300 by 300km” unit.

Comment 4: In addition, please authors to read the entire text to verify any minor errors in the text. The research conclusions and discussions need to be further strengthened. Please further refine the innovative points and main conclusions of the work.

Response: Additional statements were provided regarding the applicability of the calibration approach and the fact that such an approach ca be applied to other datasets for calibrating changes.