Review Reports - <i>useeior</i>: An Open-Source R Package for Building and Using US Environmentally-Extended Input–Output Models

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article was not written properly. Data and analysis not presented properly. High standards were not used for the presentation of results. The study is well designed, but needs improvement. I don't think the results will be interesting to the journal's readers, only a limited number of people.

Author Response

Regarding the relevance of the article to this journal, this article very much embodies the ideal of an article in the special issue 'Advanced Data Engineering for Life Cycle Applications', as it describes software that enables transparent access and full reproduction of models that are used for life cycle applications of goods and services. The reviewer's comments regarding the writing, data, analysis and presentation are not specific, nor constructive. These comments contrast with those with the other two reviewers. We do make changes to improve the quality of the article in response to the specific comments of the other reviewers.

Reviewer 2 Report

The article describes an example used and the description of the USEEIO model developed by the authors. The work is very good in general.

The following issues have to be resolved:

In Table 1 there is a list of the models and short description; I think that it is worth expanding the description and say something more about indicated version of the USEEIO model,
In some part of the text there are missing references eg. “An example of the crosswalk is 252 presented in the Supplementary Information (SI).’ Actually, this would be better if you would add some appendix to the manuscript, it would be more suitable for reader,
The references in the text should be formatted according to the journal requirements,
In line 208 when you mentioned ‘The Summary and Sector levels tables are released annually by BEA’, there should be reference to the source,
One of the output of the model calculation is the CO2eq values, can you provide the function for this,
The authors should clearly indicate the limitations of the work in the results section.

The text of the manuscript describes in detail the steps to reproduce their results and actually to work alone on different dataset. Congratulations to the authors for their great work.

Author Response

The article describes an example used and the description of the USEEIO model developed by the authors. The work is very good in general.

Thank you.

The following issues have to be resolved:

Comment 1. In Table 1 there is a list of the models and short description; I think that it is worth expanding the description and say something more about indicated version of the USEEIO model.

Additional text was added in Table 1 to further describe each model. Common features of the models were added in table caption.

Comment 2. In some part of the text there are missing references eg. "An example of the crosswalk is 252 presented in the Supplementary Information (SI).' Actually, this would be better if you would add some appendix to the manuscript, it would be more suitable for reader.

Thank you for the comment. We added the specific section number in the Supplementary Information (SI) to point to the example of crosswalk. The SI is separate from the manuscript but will be available to readers when accepted for publication.

Comment 3. The references in the text should be formatted according to the journal requirements.

Thank you for the comment. The reference style was updated to match Applied Sciences format.

Comment 4. In line 208 when you mentioned 'The Summary and Sector levels tables are released annually by BEA', there should be reference to the source.

Thank you for the comment. A new reference to BEA was added for this sentence.

Comment 5. One of the output of the model calculation is the CO2eq values, can you provide the function for this?

Conversion from individual greenhouse gases to CO₂eq were represented by equations 17-18 and 23-24 in 'section 2.6. EEIO matrices construction'. Generation of LCIA characterization factors and methods were described in 'section 2.4. Indicators and life cycle impact assessment characterization factors'. Additional text was added in section 2.4., section 2.6., and 'section 3. Results' to clarify the CO2eq values were generated using the TRACI method.

Comment 6. The authors should clearly indicate the limitations of the work in the results section.

Text was added in Conclusions to describe the limitations of useeior and future work that will address those limitations.

The text of the manuscript describes in detail the steps to reproduce their results and actually to work alone on different dataset. Congratulations to the authors for their great work.

Thank you.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors propose an open-source package that builds USEEIO models, particularly a family of environmentally-extended input-output models of US goods and services which can be used for life cycle assessment, environmental footprint estimation, and related applications. Overall the manuscript is fine, however, there are certain modifications which author must do before the final acceptance. Here are my comments.

1) Abstract is too introductory about the package, you must focus on what you have proposed which I can see only in the last two lines. It is highly recommended to rewrite the abstract in a more technical way.

2. Please mention the contribution of this paper in the last paragraph of your introduction after the objective part.

3) can it be initialized with only .csv files? or other formats may also work? please specify.

4) In various parts of the algorithm more than one space between the commands is used, please check thoroughly this throughout the paper as it may give errors to the user who is following this and using this package for the first time.

5) How do you arrive at equations 1 to 4? Any basis for it?

I hope these comments help in further improving the paper.

Author Response

Thank you. Please see our responses to your comments below.

Comment 1. Abstract is too introductory about the package, you must focus on what you have proposed which I can see only in the last two lines. It is highly recommended to rewrite the abstract in a more technical way.

Thank you for the comment. We revised the abstract to explicitly describe the challenge useeior aims to address and highlight the importance and distinction of useeior.

Comment 2. Please mention the contribution of this paper in the last paragraph of your introduction after the objective part.

Thank you for the comment. Text was added in the end of introduction to highlight the contribution of this paper.

Comment 3. can it be initialized with only .csv files? or other formats may also work? please specify.

We added text in Model Initialization section to clarify models can be initialized with model configuration in .yml format only and related data files in .csv format only.

Comment 4. In various parts of the algorithm more than one space between the commands is used, please check thoroughly this throughout the paper as it may give errors to the user who is following this and using this package for the first time.

Thank you for the comment. The spaces in commands/code are code indentation to improve readability. We have carefully reviewed each command to ensure they work correctly. We will work with the editor to adjust font and/or size to make the commands more aesthetic in prints.

Comment 5. How do you arrive at equations 1 to 4? Any basis for it?

The equations are defined with more context in a paper we recently published about USEEIO v2.0 models, so we removed some text and the equations in this section then added reference to that paper.