Integrated Assessment and Restoration Pathways for Holistic Ecosystem Health in Anxi County, China
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis paper tried to construct an integrated assessment system that examines an area’s entire ecosystem health. However, from the overall content of the article, there are still the following main issues.
1. There have been many studies on comprehensive assessment of ecosystem health. This paper is not progressiveness compared with the existing literature in terms of index selection, method model, etc.
2. The article selects Anxi County as the research area. The reason for choosing the county was not given. What are the unique characteristics of Anxi County in terms of ecosystem compared to other places? What is the typicality of the conclusions drawn from the study of Anxi County and whether they have reference significance for other regions? These require further explanation by the author.
3. The author used a lot of raster data during the research process. What is the resolution and is it suitable for county-level research?
4. In line 321, the author believes that all indicators are equally important. In fact, there are inevitably dominant subsystems in the ecosystems of different regions, that is, the roles of each subsystem are different. It is unreasonable to simply assume that all subsystems have the same importance.
5. In the fourth part, the article provides a simple summary of the spatial pattern of each indicator, without a detailed analysis of the problems existing in each indicator.
6. The article only conducts a separate analysis of major ecosystems such as mountains, water, and forests, without delving into their mutual influence.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
After careful consideration, I have identified several concerns and defects in the manuscript, which should be addressed before it can be considered for publication.
Introduction: In line 64, it is advisable to update the references with more recent sources.
Figure 3: The indicators and indexes, especially those related to water, do not align with the ecological issues presented in Figure 2. This article underscores the significance of identifying suitable key characteristic indicators for assessing ecological health.
Indicators M1 and M2 should focus on anthropogenic pollutions that impact the ecosystem. Figure 2 highlights ecosystem degradation resulting from mining activities.
Line 165-175: Indicators W1-W3 are intended to address water-related ecological concerns, including river pollutants, inadequate sewage disposal facilities, reduced water system connectivity, and untreated sewage discharge. However, there appears to be a disconnect between these issues and the indicators of water density, rainfall erosivity, and evapotranspiration. Can you clarify how W1-W3 are linked to the water ecological issues related to river pollutants, inadequate sewage disposal facilities, reduced water system connectivity, and untreated sewage discharge?
Indicators C1-C2: If we aim to reflect the soil's water retention, soil water content, and grain size, these indicators may be suitable for use.
When selecting ecosystem service capacity indicators for water conservation capacity (E1), it is important to take into account the primary production and fisheries resources capacity of the aquatic ecosystem.
the manuscript holds potential, but it needs substantial revisions to address the issues outlined above. I recommend that the authors carefully reevaluate their choice of key characteristic indicators, provide more clarity and justification for the selected indicators, and ensure that the research objectives are reflected in the indicators chosen. Once these issues have been addressed, the manuscript may be suitable for publication in the Sustainability journal.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe fundamental characteristic indicators of primary ecosystems (mountain, water, forest, and agriculture) and ecosystem service capacity indicators in Anxi County, China, were chosen for this study to build an integrated evaluation system of ecosystem health. This article also attempted to evaluate the integrated ecosystem restoration strategies that addressed the ecological issues facing the county. The authors have used four distinct ecosystems, namely mountain, forest, cropland and water, for ecosystem service evaluation. The methodology looks adequate, but the choice of indicators needs to be validated. The results are comprehensive and explicit; however, figure 4 needs reworking. Additionally, the authors need to address the following comments:
Comments:
1. Line 53-54: The authors have mentioned, “Ecosystem health has been explained from many perspectives…” They are requested to explain the perspectives with examples.
2. There are ample publications available that evaluate ecosystem health. The authors stated in line 57 that “However, ecosystem health has yet to be defined in a coherent and clear manner…” How did the authors get the idea that it has not been defined?
3. Line 107, what is meant by “entire ecosystem health”?
4. The authors should mention the previous publications on ecosystem health assessment in the study area. What were the knowledge gaps in those studies? How this present study will address the remaining issues?
5. The authors are requested to explain how low soil fertility triggers intensified water and soil loss in figure 2.
6. What is meant by water density in figure 3? Is it drainage density? How is it measured?
7. The authors are requested to elaborate the pre-processing of remote sensing datasets. They need to mention the date/time of the data acquisition, the type of sensors and their resolution. Also, there are multiple datasets used in this study with different resolutions. The authors need to mention what kind of resampling was used.
8. The authors need to provide more information on the datasets taken from the National Earth System Science Data Centre. As precipitation, evapotranspiration, and NPP data are freely available from MODIS or any other known sources, they don’t need any details, but datasets taken from this National Earth System Science Data Centre call for detailed information.
9. There are already several indices available that remove the soil background effect (example: MSAVI). The authors need to mention why they have used equation 2 instead of the established indices.
10. What is the source of equations used to calculate E1, E2 and E3? Is it already established? Is there any publication that has already used this equation?
11. What is H in equation 19?
12. The authors have mentioned that they have provided equal weights in line 324. If equal weights are to be assigned, then what is the use of equation 17-19 and “Determination of indicator weights”?
13. The images and legends of Figure 4 are not visible. The authors are requested to reproduce the figures with better accuracy and bugger size.
Comments on the Quality of English Language
Minor editing of English language required
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsEcological restoration effort has been focused on individual ecosystems but may potentially overlooked their connections. To address this problem, the authors devised an integrated index to hierarchically combine ecosystem indicators from the characteristic and the service capacity categories into one value, and qualitatively classified the ecosystem health of geological areas within the county of interest.
Major comments:
I have two major concerns regarding this research:
1. The authors classified the ecosystem health within the county into four categories: poor, medium, good, and excellent. However, there is no validation of such classification: how would the author know that the classification reflects the true ecosystem health and will be of administrative or academic use? In other words, if I randomly assign classifications to the areas in this county and compare them to the classifications given by the authors, how would the authors argue, using data that are not already present in the integrated index, that their classifications are better than my random guess?
If such data are available (e.g., maybe the total property loss due to ecological disasters?), I would expect to see a comparison in the result section. If such data are not available, I would expect some arguments in the discussion section to explain why any researcher or administrative officer should trust the integrated index devised by the authors.
2. The selection of ecosystem indicators appears to be rather subjective from my perspective: how would the author argue that all necessary indicators are included? Again, a validation using data that are not included in the integrated index would help to address this problem, but is not present in the manuscript.
Minor comments:
Line 33: Industrialization and urbanization had occurred much longer than just decades worldwide. I would argue that they peaked over the last century.
Line 303: Is H in 3.2.1.3 the same as J in 3.2.1.2?
Line 337: H is defined here again. Is it the same as in 3.2.1.3?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe author has answered my doubts about the paper in detail and made serious revisions. It is recommended to accept the paper.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your careful review of our manuscript and for accepting it for publication.
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsNumerous aspects within the revised article remain unexplained and unresolved, with a particular focus on the utilization of ecological problems in the selection of indicators.
2. The figure 1 and 9 should rectified if water pollution problem have not been taken into consideration in the key indicators and result.
3. The discussion section of article not adequately referenced.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe Manuscript may now be accepted.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your careful review of our manuscript and for accepting it for publication.
Reviewer 4 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors have clarified their research aim and methodology in their response to my comments, and it addresses my concerns regarding the validation of the classification of integrated index. The revised manuscript has reached publication grade.
However, there are two things I would like to recommend:
1. Because the soundness of the integrated index comes from the soundness of indicators selected, it would be helpful in the method section to cite existing literature where these indicators were used (likely separately) to asses the health of their corresponding ecosystems.
2. Because the aim of the integrated index is to guide restoration management, it would be good to see in the discussion section that the effectiveness of it would be evaluated in future studies.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsIn my opinion, the manuscript is intriguing because the authors discuss the assessment and restoration pathways for ecosystem health. Minor revisions could have improved the manuscript's overall comprehensiveness and academic credibility.
The sub-topic in discussion "5.2 Integrated Pathways for Ecosystem Restoration" should be closely linked to the existing literature. It is essential to consistently reference the relevant literature and discuss how your findings either support or challenge prior research. This practice serves to establish the academic context of your work."
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
