Coastal Vulnerability Assessment for Future Sea Level Rise and a Comparative Study of Two Pocket Beaches in Seasonal Scale, Ios Island, Cyclades, Greece

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1. This manuscript presents the coastal vulnerability assessment in two beaches in a Greek island (Ios Island). In the manuscript, there is only data display but no in-depth analysis and discussion, so the whole article is more like an investigation report than a scientific paper.

2. The author needs to pay attention to the dynamic change of the beach. With the rise of sea level, the coastal geomorphology, landform and dynamic environment of the beach will also change accordingly. The dynamic evaluation is also required when evaluating the vulnerability of the coast/beach in the next century.

Author Response

We would like to thank the editor and the reviewer for his/her kind remarks. You will find submitted our responses.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting this paper. It certainly includes worthy results abut coastal vulnerability to be included in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.

General comments: Take this as you will (since English is not my mother tongue), I suggest to re-phrase to improve the readability of section 3, 4, 5 and 6. My humble feeling is that concepts or comparison are taken for granted and could be stated better. I also suggest a check of grammar and small typos, especially commas before “and”.

Materials and Methods + Results: I assume these sections have been organizing stating step by step the analyses as they were chronologically performed by the authors. I appreciated that. However, most of the sections are include just few sentences. Would you consider in merging them and just dividing the section in different paragraphs? I would also suggest to slightly re-organize the speech to make it more fluid. E.g., state you used ArcGIS once and then avoid to repeat It (if possible). It sounds redundant at places.

I often noticed the use of passive voice in this section, I suggest to use the active form since it clearly states what has been done by authors (E.g. line 239 – “Also, during the fieldwork, vertical topographic cross-sections were made.” à We also performed vertical…..).

TABLES (and number in the text): For consistency, two decimal places are recommended. Please, choose your decimal number style and be consistent (e.g., Table 4 uses both dot and comma).

Check these two abovementioned points in the main text, captions, tables and legends.

Figures and Captions: Figures are generally good, but resolutions should be uniformed (box color, font type and font size) and improved at places since scale bars, legend and/or source/credit are not always clear. They are too small compared to image areas. Color-coded arrows should be used to point what is in the figure. (E.g., in fig. 3 are mentioned dunes, but where are them?) This would help the reader as well as the use of subfigures. Captions need to be enriched and self-explicative.

The main text is divided by all these figures and since sections are represented by three or four lines at places, they’re difficult to be noted as main text. Reader could think they are captions. I suggest to merge them in panels rather than individual figures.

I suggest to delete “legend” from the legend in all figures.

Specific comments are listed below.

I hope you will find usefuel my comments.

Best regards.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We would like to thank the editor and the reviewer for his/her kind remarks. You will find submitted our responses.  

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors made good progress in improving the manuscript and responded well to the comments and suggestions.  I think this paper can be moved to next stage.

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for his/her fruitful collaboration.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting this paper. As previously stated, it certainly includes worthy results abut coastal vulnerability to be included in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering.

However, some of the required modifications have not been done through the whole manuscript at places.

For example, I asked to uniform the table style choosing one or two decimal numbers using Table 4 as example. Even in that table, decimal numbers are not uniform. Through the paper there are numbers with no decimal numbers, one decimal numbers or two decimal numbers.

In addition to this, I also asked to uniform scale bar and legend box backgrounds since the former is white, while the latter is yellowish. This has not been modified either. Generally, image resolution and quality is still low and almost nothing has been done to improve them as suggested. I suggest to replace all the information  within images (legend, scale, coordinates) with vectorial objects using graphic software (e.g. Illustrator or similar).

Talking about coordinates, sometimes they are unreadable with narrow latitude and langitude intervals  at places (fig.1, 3, 6, 8, 15, etc..). This need to be improved as well.

I would also suggest to check if all the acronyms have been stated extensively the first time they compare in the text. (e.g., DGPS or GNSS). Is DGPS-RTK (line 299) still valid or need to be replaced with DGPS-GNSS as well?

The abovementioned comments are some of the issues I assessed in this version of your manuscript. These are the reason why I suggest to reconsider editing in the light of the previous comments file through the whole manuscript.

Best regards

 

 

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for his/her fruitful comments. You will find attached our response to the comments. 

 

Best regards,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I'm glad to see the modifications you did through the whole manuscript. 

About decimal numbers comment. I can only see the tracked manuscript and it's difficult to discern edits, so take this as an example: 5 --> 5.00, 5.1 --> 5.10 if you want to keep two decimal numbers.

Well done.