Inventory and Distribution Characteristics of Large-Scale Landslides in Baoji City, Shaanxi Province, China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors

Congratulations on your work.

Your paper aims to update the landslide inventory within a certain area of interest and to provide preliminary and basic information for some of the critical landslide influencing factors in order to guide further research steps.  It would have been much appreciated if some suggestions could be given for further research and in terms of landslide susceptibility analysis. 

Some comments and suggested revisions are included in the attachment, which is believed that they can improve the overall appearance of your paper.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Globally, the paper is  clear and well structured. The figures of the article are  well drawn. Reference list is complete

Some suggestions: 

a) Figure 1: what means invading rocks?

b) Figure 1: there are 12 ages and 5 lithologies in the caption. I think you have to insert the 12 lithologies plus ages and 5 lithologies (old invading rocks). 

c)  The description of rainfall and climate is to short. I suggest to insert a graph of rainfall and temperature before chapter 3

d) in the conclusions there is a well-structrured analysis of description of the investigations. I suggest to insert a sentence about the type of landslides....

deep-seated landslides? slow-moving landslides?

e) I think at the end of  conclusions it is better to discuss as future investigations about Landslide Susceptibilty Maps (LSM)

f) the reference of Piacentini is wrong. CLOCkER

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors present a study dealing with the spatial analysis of landslides occurred around Baoji City, China. The analyses are carried out considering eight morphological and geological variables and after preparing an inventory of the landslides occurred in the study area.

In my opinion the paper is interesting and quite well written, and the results presented herein are worth of being published after some revisions in Sections 1, 4.1 and 4.2 and after solving some issues in other Section of the paper (see following comments).

 

MAIN COMMENTS

 

INTRODUCTION: I agree that landslide inventories are crucial for analysing the distribution of landslides over a study area and I am aware that part of this study is the collection of information on landslides occurrence. However, in my opinion the most relevant part of this study is the susceptibility analysis carried out considering eight variables. Regarding the clustering of landslides, some recent works deal with spatio-temporal cluster analyses of landslides. As an example, you can cite the paper published by Tonini et al. (2020):

 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17499518.2020.1861634

 

4.1 INFLUENCING FACTORS SELECTED: What do you mean with fault? I guess that the meaning of this variable is quite ambiguous. Could you clarify its meaning?

You state that stream, slope, and aspect information were derived from a DEM at 12.5 resolution, while the lithology from a geological map at 1:200000 scale. How did you deal with data at different resolutions? What about the resolution of the land cover data and the map provided by Deng et al.?

 

4.2 STATISTICS AND ANALYSIS: Add the equations used for calculating the landslide number density (LND) and the landslide area percentage (LAP). However, the main concern in this Section is the methodology for the susceptibility analysis. Considering that you deal with eight variables, your study could benefit from the application of statistical analyses focused on the identification of the most relevant variables for landslides initiation. Besides, statistical methods could allow you to better analyze the results and to carry out a susceptibility map of the study area.

As a reference, you can read this paper:

 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.catena.2015.12.017

 

As a general comment, the overall quality of the Figures needs to be significantly improved before publication (especially Figures 4 and 11)

 

English needs to be revised, as several terms are not appropriate and there are several typos and error throughout the text (some examples are reported in the specific comments).

 

 

SPECIFIC COMMENTS:

 

Page 1, line 16: I suggest using “variables” rather than “influencing factors”, as it is more used for susceptibility assessment analyses

 

Page 1, line 18: Change “controls” with “influence”

 

Page 1, line 28: Change “sensitivity” with “susceptibility”

 

Page 4, line 117: I suggest indicating the three earthquakes in Figure 1, without any reference to Figure 6 in this Section

 

Change the title of Section 3 from “Landslide inventorying” to “Landslide inventory”

 

Page 6, line 186: Change “abundance” with “distribution”

 

Page 8, line 202: What do you mean with “unevenness”?

 

Page 8, line 207: Change “developed” with “occurred”

 

Page 12, lines 296-297: Delete “put forward a concept of "aggregated 296 distribution" of loess landslides. They…”

 

Page 12, line 298: Change “aggregated zones” with “zones of aggregation”

 

Page 12, line 298: Change “loess landslides” with “landslides in loose soils” here and throughout the text

 

Page 12, line 299: Delete “of this paper”

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx