Spatiotemporal Changes and Driving Factors of Ecosystem Health in the Qinling-Daba Mountains

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is devoted to the issue of mapping and spatial analysis of the health of ecosystems and the factors influencing it, which is relevant for territorial planning. The article is written in clear English, only minor corrections are needed. There are also several questions on the meaning of the presented results, which it is desirable to resolve. After these corrections, the article is worthy of publication.

Detailed comments

Line 12. Inappropriate use of the word "reservoir". In environmental literature, this word is often referred to as a water storage reservoir.

Line 13. Inappropriate use of the word "barrier" which often means a kind of an obstacle. So, this phrase means that QDM is an obstacle to China's environmental security.

Lines 19-20. "ecosystem organization is a major obstacle in the process of improvement" - need to be rephrased. "Ecosystem organization" is inappropriate  word here. May be better use "ecosystem diversity" (see comment on line 131). The meaning of this statement is incomprehensible and is not explained in the text. How can ecosystem diversity be an obstacle to improvement?

Line 65. It is necessary to explain the GWR abbreviation at the first mention.

Line 69. "The QDM is a key biodiversity ecological function area in China" - It is advisable to rephrase. May be: a key area for biodiversity protection and maintenance (provisioning) ecological functions)

Lines 69-70. This phrase is incomprehensible: "With an eco-69 logical red line area of nearly 70%"

Lines 96-98. "The study area is a transitional zone between China's humanities, geography, climate, and biology" -  it is advisable to rephrase. "Humanities" - means humanitarian sciences. Do you mean "humans"? "Transitional zone" - doesn't seem to fit here very well. Maybe "a zone of interaction between humanitarian, geographical, climatic and biological issues"?

Line 112.  It is necessary to explain the DEM abbreviation at the first mention

Line 115. GDP is the Gross domestic product, i.e. monetary measure of goods and services produced and sold by countries.  Here, obviously, gross regional domestic product (GRDP) or gross domestic product of region (GDPR) is meant.

Line 131. "Organization" is inappropriate  word here. When talking about ecosystems, the terms "diversity" or "structure" are usually used. In cited paper of R. Costanza (1992) the expression "Health as Diversity or Complexity" is used. Judging by your methodology for assessing this indicator, "diversity" is more suitable here. It is also desirable to replace "organization" with "diversity" throughout the rest of the text.

Line 152, Table 1. It is necessary to explain where the coefficients of resilience and resistance come from.

Line 159. "Moran’s I" - this subtitle doesn't work.

Line 190-193. This is more related to the Methods section.

Line 206. Mistake: it is Table 2

Line 246-247. "Spatial dependency of ecosystem health" - "dependency" is inappropriate  word here. Dependence usually means a change in one variable (A) when another (B) changes, i.e. the dependence of A on B. It's probably better to use the terms "aggregation", "pattern", "autocorrelation" here.

Line 254. The term "evolution" should not be used when talking about changes that are not related to the biological evolution of organisms or ecosystems. In this case, these are changes, dynamics, trends, but not evolution.

Line 275. What is "Rook contiguity"?

Lines 343-344. See above comments about "evolution".

Line 345. "Natural factors are relatively stable" - This is not true for PFL.

Lines 368-370. "... its (PFL) negative impact is gradually deepening and spreading. This is due to the high vegetation cover in mountainous ecosystems, and its effect on ecosystem improvement decreases when vegetation cover reaches a certain level". The first statement is completely incomprehensible and unfounded. The second sentence does not explain it. The negative effect is not at all equal to the weakening of the positive effect.

Line 424. Inappropriate wording "we dynamically analyzed". It will be better "we analyzed the dynamics of...".

Author Response

Thanks for your letter and for reviewers' comments concerning our manuscript entitled "Spatiotemporal Changes and Driving Factors of Ecosystem Health in the Qinling-Daba Mountains"(Manuscript ID: ijgi-1988768). Those comments are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious correction. Revised portion are marked in red in the manuscript. The main corrections and the responds to the reviewers' comments are as flowing:

 

Reviewer #1: The article is devoted to the issue of mapping and spatial analysis of the health of ecosystems and the factors influencing it, which is relevant for territorial planning. The article is written in clear English, only minor corrections are needed. There are also several questions on the meaning of the presented results, which it is desirable to resolve. After these corrections, the article is worthy of publication.

Line 12. Inappropriate use of the word "reservoir". In environmental literature, this word is often referred to as a water storage reservoir.

Response: We appreciate your valuable suggestions and kind advices very much. We have replaced the word "reservoir" with "water tower".

 

Line 13. Inappropriate use of the word "barrier" which often means a kind of an obstacle. So, this phrase means that QDM is an obstacle to China's environmental security.

Response: We changed the word "barrier" to "protective wall", making this phrase means that QDM is a protective wall to protect China.

 

Lines 19-20. "ecosystem organization is a major obstacle in the process of improvement" - need to be rephrased. "Ecosystem organization" is inappropriate word here. May be better use "ecosystem diversity" (see comment on line 131). The meaning of this statement is incomprehensible and is not explained in the text. How can ecosystem diversity be an obstacle to improvement?

Response: We revised it to "the regional differences in ecological organization are the most prominent". And we do not believe that "ecosystem organization" should be replaced by "ecosystem diversity", because ecosystem organization uses landscape indicators to represent the structural stability of ecosystems.

 

Line 65. It is necessary to explain the GWR abbreviation at the first mention.

Response: The full name is supposed to be the first time it appears, we've added the full name "geographically weighted regression".

 

Line 69. "The QDM is a key biodiversity ecological function area in China" - It is advisable to rephrase. May be: a key area for biodiversity protection and maintenance (provisioning) ecological functions)

Response: We modified "The QDM is a key biodiversity ecological function area in China" to "The QDM is a key area for biodiversity protection and maintenance ecological function". For details, please see lines 69-70.

 

Lines 96-98. "The study area is a transitional zone between China's humanities, geography, climate, and biology" - it is advisable to rephrase. "Humanities" - means humanitarian sciences. Do you mean "humans"? "Transitional zone" - doesn't seem to fit here very well. Maybe "a zone of interaction between humanitarian, geographical, climatic and biological issues"?

Response: Great! Your wording seems to be more expressive, and I have modified this sentence to " The study area is an interactive zone between China's humans, geography, climate, and biology". For details, please see lines 97-99.

 

Line 112.  It is necessary to explain the DEM abbreviation at the first mention.

Response: The full name is supposed to be the first time it appears, we've added the full name "Digital Elevation Model". For details, please see line 117.

 

Line 115. GDP is the Gross domestic product, i.e. monetary measure of goods and services produced and sold by countries.  Here, obviously, gross regional domestic product (GRDP) or gross domestic product of region (GDPR) is meant.

Response: We changed GDP to GRDP to make the expression of the article more accurate.

 

Line 131. "Organization" is inappropriate word here. When talking about ecosystems, the terms "diversity" or "structure" are usually used. In cited paper of R. Costanza (1992) the expression "Health as Diversity or Complexity" is used. Judging by your methodology for assessing this indicator, "diversity" is more suitable here. It is also desirable to replace "organization" with "diversity" throughout the rest of the text.

Response: We do not believe that "ecosystem organization" should be replaced by "ecosystem diversity", because ecosystem organization uses landscape indicators to represent the structural stability of ecosystems

 

Line 152, Table 1. It is necessary to explain where the coefficients of resilience and resistance come from.

Response: We explain where the resilience and resistance coefficients come from. For details, please see lines 170- 185.

 

Line 159. "Moran’s I" - this subtitle doesn't work.

Response: Sorry, we didn't understand what you mean, but we have changed "Moran's I" to "Moran's I index".

 

Line 190-193. This is more related to the Methods section.

Response: We have adjusted the position of this part to Section 2.2, lines 114-116.

 

Line 206. Mistake: it is Table 2

Response: The serial number of our revised table is Table 2.

 

Line 246-247. "Spatial dependency of ecosystem health" - "dependency" is inappropriate word here. Dependence usually means a change in one variable (A) when another (B) changes, i.e. the dependence of A on B. It's probably better to use the terms "aggregation", "pattern", "autocorrelation" here.

Response: We modified "Spatial dependency of ecosystem health" to "Spatial autocorrelation of ecosystem health".

 

Line 254. The term "evolution" should not be used when talking about changes that are not related to the biological evolution of organisms or ecosystems. In this case, these are changes, dynamics, trends, but not evolution.

Response: We modified "evolution" to "dynamics".

 

Line 275. What is "Rook contiguity"?

Response: Rook contiguity refers to when only the common edges of polygons are considered to define the adjacency relationship (common vertices are ignored). We explain Rook contiguity in lines 298-299.

 

Lines 343-344. See above comments about "evolution".

Response: We modified "evolution" to " trends".

 

Line 345. "Natural factors are relatively stable" - This is not true for PFL.

Response: The wording of this sentence was incorrect and we have deleted it.

 

Lines 368-370. "... its (PFL) negative impact is gradually deepening and spreading. This is due to the high vegetation cover in mountainous ecosystems, and its effect on ecosystem improvement decreases when vegetation cover reaches a certain level". The first statement is completely incomprehensible and unfounded. The second sentence does not explain it. The negative effect is not at all equal to the weakening of the positive effect.

Response: The reason why the first sentence describes this is that in Figure 6 (j-l), the minimum value of the coefficient has changed from -0.1 in 2000 to -0.4 in 2020. And the number of districts and counties with negative coefficients has increased from 7 to 24. We have revised the second sentence. Although there is no causal relationship before and after, PFL does have two sides to the improvement of ecological health, and it is not that the higher the ratio, the better.

 

Line 424. Inappropriate wording "we dynamically analyzed". It will be better "we analyzed the dynamics of...".

Response: We modified " we dynamically analyzed the ecosystem health" to ""we analyzed the dynamics of the ecosystem health".

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The topic on ecosystem health assessment as well as its driving forces is not very interseting, in perspective of traditional conceptual framework and methodoligies. However, it indeed is important to be applied for QDM in China. In this way, this paper has a certain readability. The structure is well organized, the methods selected are suitable, and the results are well presented. However, the followings shold be noted:

1. Line 134. vitality or vigor ? Please keep consistent throughtout whole paper.

2. Line 139-143. Please clarify the reason on coefficient determination of each landscape index. 

3. Line 144-148. If I understand correctly, formula (4) should be: EC = 0.3 × resil + 0.7 × resist ? (Peng, J.; Liu, Y.; Li, T.; Wu, J. Regional ecosystem health response to rural land use change: A case study in Lijiang City, China. 536 Ecol. Indic. 2017, 72, 399-410). While if f(4) is correct, please clarify the coefficient determination (0.78 for resil and 0.3 for resist). Otherwise, I would further query about the correction of the final results.

4. Line 149-152. You must present how you determine the coefficient of resilience and resistance, although table 1 is almost the same as Peng. J. et al., 2017.

5. Major revision is needed for driving forces of ecosystem health change. Firdtly, you should set forth why you choose these factors or how these factors infuence EH before the section Results. Secondly, I don't think PBL, PFL and DEM are the factors impact EH change. Please investigate previous studies or give your own framework for factor selection.

 

Author Response

Thanks for your letter and for reviewers' comments concerning our manuscript entitled "Spatiotemporal Changes and Driving Factors of Ecosystem Health in the Qinling-Daba Mountains"(Manuscript ID: ijgi-1988768). Those comments are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious correction. Revised portion are marked in red in the manuscript. The main corrections and the responds to the reviewers' comments are as flowing:

Reviewer #2: The topic on ecosystem health assessment as well as its driving forces is not very interseting, in perspective of traditional conceptual framework and methodoligies. However, it indeed is important to be applied for QDM in China. In this way, this paper has a certain readability. The structure is well organized, the methods selected are suitable, and the results are well presented. However, the followings shold be noted:

1. Line 134. vitality or vigor? Please keep consistent throughout whole paper.

Response: We appreciate your valuable suggestions and kind advices very much. We have unified the full paper of "vigor".

 

2. Line 139-143. Please clarify the reason on coefficient determination of each landscape index.

Response: Ecosystem organization (O) is refers to the structural stability of ecosystem, and is related to spatial patterns. The landscape pattern index reflects landscape heterogeneity and landscape connectivity to measure spatial patterns. Landscape heterogeneity mainly studies spatial heterogeneity, measured by landscape diversity and landscape fractal dimension, corresponding to Shannon’s diversity index and area-weighted mean patch fractal dimension index in this paper, respectively. Connectivity was measured by fragmentation and patch cohesion. Landscape connectivity is quantified by landscape fragmentation index and landscape contagion index. As the dominant land use type in mountainous areas, forest connectivity is determined by the fragmentation index and patch cohesion index of forest. For details, please see lines 149-158.

 

3. Line 144-148. If I understand correctly, formula (4) should be: EC = 0.3 × resil + 0.7 × resist? (Peng, J.; Liu, Y.; Li, T.; Wu, J. Regional ecosystem health response to rural land use change: A case study in Lijiang City, China. 536 Ecol. Indic. 2017, 72, 399-410). While if f(4) is correct, please clarify the coefficient determination (0.78 for resil and 0.3 for resist). Otherwise, I would further query about the correction of the final results.

Response: I am very sorry that the 0.78 in Equation 4 is a typo. Lines 158-160 explain that the formula is 0.7 for resil and 0.3 for resist, and the calculation results are also based on this standard. We have revised the formula, and we will check the formula in the full text.

 

4. Line 149-152. You must present how you determine the coefficient of resilience and resistance, although table 1 is almost the same as Peng. J. et al., 2017.

Response: We explain how to determine the magnitude of resilience and resistance coefficients. For details, please see lines 170-185.

 

5. Major revision is needed for driving forces of ecosystem health change. Firstly, you should set forth why you choose these factors or how these factors influence EH before the section Results. Secondly, I don't think PBL, PFL and DEM are the factors impact EH change. Please investigate previous studies or give your own framework for factor selection.

Response: We have added Section 2.3.3 to explain the reasons for the driver selection. For details, please see lines 206-222.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is well written. However, there are some points to be revised.

1. The research process could be a little difficult for readers. Could you make a diagram of the methodology?

2. There should be fewer maps in the results and discussion section. Would you be able to show some key maps? How about moving some of them into the appendix?

Author Response

Thanks for your letter and for reviewers' comments concerning our manuscript entitled "Spatiotemporal Changes and Driving Factors of Ecosystem Health in the Qinling-Daba Mountains"(Manuscript ID: ijgi-1988768). Those comments are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious correction. Revised portion are marked in red in the manuscript. The main corrections and the responds to the reviewers' comments are as flowing:

 

Reviewer #3: The paper is well written. However, there are some points to be revised.

1. The research process could be a little difficult for readers. Could you make a diagram of the methodology?

Response: We appreciate your valuable suggestions and kind advices very much. We added an overall framework diagram (Figure 2) in Section 2.3 to facilitate readers to understand the process of this study. For details, please see lines 135-141.

 

2. There should be fewer maps in the results and discussion section. Would you be able to show some key maps? How about moving some of them into the appendix?

Response: Thanks for your suggestion, we have moved several of these graphs to the appendix.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors explored the spatial characteristics of ecosystem health of the Qinling-Daba Mountain and its natural and anthropogenic drivers at the county level from 2000 to 2020. The topic is interesting and falls within the scope of this journal. The manuscript is well written but the discussion could be further improved. Here comes my concerns.

 

The authors mentioned other research on ecosystem health drivers, but the discussion is inadequate. It would be better to make more comprehensive comparisons with other articles, such as at the level of natural and social factors, which may help improve the literature.

 

To use an abbreviation, write the full name in the first instance. Ex.: GWR

 

I think using the full name of Qinling-Daba Mountain is better than QDM, which is not a commonly used abbreviation and is difficult to understand.

 

Line 303：I suggest added comparisons between counties within provinces (if other provinces have similar typical characteristics), because environmental policies within provinces are more similar, which can reduce the interference of different environmental regulatory intensities to driver analysis.

Author Response

Thanks for your letter and for reviewers' comments concerning our manuscript entitled "Spatiotemporal Changes and Driving Factors of Ecosystem Health in the Qinling-Daba Mountains"(Manuscript ID: ijgi-1988768). Those comments are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious correction. Revised portion are marked in red in the manuscript. The main corrections and the responds to the reviewers' comments are as flowing:

 

Reviewer #4: The authors explored the spatial characteristics of ecosystem health of the Qinling-Daba Mountain and its natural and anthropogenic drivers at the county level from 2000 to 2020. The topic is interesting and falls within the scope of this journal. The manuscript is well written but the discussion could be further improved. Here come my concerns.

The authors mentioned other research on ecosystem health drivers, but the discussion is inadequate. It would be better to make more comprehensive comparisons with other articles, such as at the level of natural and social factors, which may help improve the literature.

Response: We appreciate your valuable suggestions and kind advices very much. We perform a more comprehensive comparison with other papers to more fully discuss the impact of different drivers on ecosystem health. For details, please see Section 4.2.

 

To use an abbreviation, write the full name in the first instance. Ex.: GWR

Response: The full name is supposed to be the first time it appears, we've added the full name.

 

I think using the full name of Qinling-Daba Mountain is better than QDM, which is not a commonly used abbreviation and is difficult to understand.

Response: We have replaced "QDM" with the full name "Qinling-Daba Mountains" in the manuscript.

 

Line 303: I suggest added comparisons between counties within provinces (if other provinces have similar typical characteristics), because environmental policies within provinces are more similar, which can reduce the interference of different environmental regulatory intensities to driver analysis.

Response: Thanks for your suggestion. But we have some disagreements on this issue. Here are some of our reasons. Nowadays, it has been advocating the establishment of a regional linkage mechanism to continuously promote ecological protection and high-quality development in the Qinling-Daba Mountains. This manuscript is dedicated to the overall evaluation of the research area, providing some scientific basis for the regional planning, and counties are also the main front for ecological environment governance.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 5 Report

The following questions need to be addressed by the author: 

1 Ecosystem health assessment and drivers analysis are the basic paradigm that have been widely used in current research, so what is the knowledge gap in this paper? What is the contribution to the field of ecological health assessment? 

2 In "1 Introduction", “However, traditional statistical or spatial analysis methods are unable to quantify the interactions of drivers caused by the complexity of geographic processes and their combined effects on ecosystem health”, but this paper also does not analyze the interaction and combined effects. 

3 As the author said, QDM is a typical mountain ecosystem, but there is almost no difference between the index system in this manuscript and the other research. How to reflect the natural ecological characteristics of this region? 

4 The manuscript points out that QDM is a sensitive area of climate change, but there is no relevant factor of climate change in the driving factors. Please explain why. 

5 Why does this paper not adopt VORS framework considering ecosystem services? 

6 "4.1 Space management" is almost the test of GWR model, I cannot understand how to conduct space management based on health?

Author Response

Thanks for your letter and for reviewers' comments concerning our manuscript entitled "Spatiotemporal Changes and Driving Factors of Ecosystem Health in the Qinling-Daba Mountains"(Manuscript ID: ijgi-1988768). Those comments are all valuable and helpful for revising and improving our manuscript. We have studied all comments carefully and have made conscientious correction. Revised portion are marked in red in the manuscript. The main corrections and the responds to the reviewers' comments are as flowing:

 

Reviewer #5: The following questions need to be addressed by the author:

1 Ecosystem health assessment and driver analysis are the basic paradigm that have been widely used in current research, so what is the knowledge gap in this paper? What is the contribution to the field of ecological health assessment? 

Response: We appreciate your sharp and insightful comments. It can be seen from your comments that you have a deeper understanding of the research content of this manuscript. Combining the VOR model and the GWR model to analyze the health level of the ecosystem is an attempt with few previous studies. The VOR model can evaluate ecosystem health holistically in terms of metabolic capacity, structural stability, and resilience, while the GWR can visualize the effects of different drivers. The combination of the two is a new attempt to assess ecosystem health at the county level. Reviewing is a good option. Although some studies have performed ecosystem health assessment and driving force analysis (e.g. He. J. et al., 2019), they have not combined these two methods for county-level studies.

 

2 In "1 Introduction", “However, traditional statistical or spatial analysis methods are unable to quantify the interactions of drivers caused by the complexity of geographic processes and their combined effects on ecosystem health”, but this paper also does not analyze the interaction and combined effects. 

Response: This statement may be linguistically inaccurate, and we will replace it with "However, traditional statistical and spatial analysis methods do not reflect the spatiotemporal variability of different drivers of geographic processes, which may limit practical decision-making of ecological environment management policies". For details, please see lines 61-63.

 

3 As the author said, QDM is a typical mountain ecosystem, but there is almost no difference between the index system in this manuscript and the other research. How to reflect the natural ecological characteristics of this region? 

Response: We have added Section 2.3.3 to explain the reasons for the driver selection. For details, please see lines 206-222.

 

4 The manuscript points out that QDM is a sensitive area of climate change, but there is no relevant factor of climate change in the driving factors. Please explain why. 

Response: Firstly, we amend this sentence to read " The study area is an interactive zone between China's humans, geography, climate, and biology, and it is also a fragile area of the ecological environment". And the reason behind the lack of driving factors is that at the beginning, four natural factors of annual mean precipitation (PRE), annual mean temperature (TEM), DEM, and PFL and three anthropogenic factors of POP, PBL, and GDP were selected to explore their effects on the ecosystem health of the county. The seven dependent variables were tested for multicollinearity. The variance inflation factor of PRE and TEM was greater than 10, which had strong multicollinearity with other variables, so these two variables were excluded. For details, please see Section 2.3.3.

 

5 Why does this paper not adopt VORS framework considering ecosystem services? 

Response: Further work will follow with the VORS model for relevant comparative studies, and this paper uses the VOR model for exploration to facilitate the work.

 

6 "4.1 Space management" is almost the test of GWR model, I cannot understand how to conduct space management based on health?

Response: The subtitle of 4.1 may be inappropriate and we prefer to change it to "Methodological advantages of GWR".

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript has been well revised. I would like to recommend the acceptance. 

Reviewer 5 Report

The author has made a good modification