Development of a webGIS Application to Assess Conflicting Activities in the Framework of Marine Spatial Planning
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This paper presents a summary of a webGIS application that was developed (or is being developed?) to assess conflicts between various activities in the Cyclades region of the Aegean Sea. These efforts are meant to add information and assist planners in the area in the context of the implementation of a Marine Spatial Planning (MSP) framework.
This paper is clear and mostly lays out the details of the application with some examples shown in Figures 3-7.
The authors need to include more information on the data sources for the layers in the application. A table of input datasets in the methods section would help the reader to get a more complete sense of the scope of the datasets included in the tool.
In terms of results and discussion, this paper could have much more to say. I think the authors could use this application to answer any number of science questions. Where are the areas with the most intense conflicts? Which activities do the authors feel are most important? Do the authors have any policy recommendations or other ideas to add? Are there other data sets or activities that should be included? This may be beyond the scope of this paper, but the results are very thin as written. I think it would be valuable for the authors to generate more examples and provide more in the way of results to better show the reader what can be done with the application.
I also think the examples in figures 3-7 could be made smaller, or perhaps even put in a panel. This is up to the editor and authors, but these figures seem a bit large to me, which makes this section cumbersome to scroll through.
Figure 8 is poor. I realize the y-axis has breaks, but perhaps a log scale could be used. With Table 1, I’m not sure that Figure 8 is even needed.
Are these tools currently available to the public? It says on line 313 that access is or will be free, although on line 297 ir says that the application is “proposed”. Do the authors have a plan to release this application, perhaps to be served by ESRI? If so, this should be made clear. The benefits of tools such as these is diminished if users don’t know about them or can’t access them.
Overall, this is a description of a (proposed?) webGIS application/tool, with little in the way of results. My suggestion is to more fully describe the datasets that are part of the tool, use the tool to generate more examples and expand the results and discussion to more fully describe the potential uses of the application.
Specific Comments:
Line 206: Should be ”…allows the detection of areas where two user-defined conflicts co-exist….”
Line 209: Should be ”…allows the detection of areas where more than a user-selected number of conflicts co-exist….”
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors proposed a webGIS application to assess conflicting activities in the framework of Marine Spatial Planning. The study is adequately conducted using an extensive literature review. The manuscript is generally well-written and easy to follow.
Comments
- In this research, the authors used very classical geoprocessing tools to identify the conflicting activities. But I would appreciate it if they could explain the novelty and significance of this research as I see that they used very commonly used geoprocessing tools.
- The discussion chapter is missing in this manuscript. The author could add a discussion chapter to discuss the findings, significance, and novelty of their research.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors have improved this manuscript greatly. The added detail for the examples along with the enhanced discussion and conclusion sections make this paper much stronger.
Reviewer 2 Report
I would like to thank the authors for addressing my questions. The paper looks great now.
