Shifts in Salt Marsh Vegetation Landcover after Debris Flow Deposition

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

he paper 'Shifts in Salt Marsh Vegetation Landcover After Debris Flow Deposition' by Silva et al. is well-written and has a high originality note.

1. The Introduction  summarizes recent research related to the topic and establishes the originality of the research aims by demonstrating the need for investigations in the topic area.

Anyway, the paragraph 26-34 needs to be moved to Material and Methods

45-51 repeats in detail the previous paragraph

58-65 repeats in detail the previous paragraph

77-82 the idea is sufficient and well argued in the previous paragraph so it would not be needed anymore

2. Materials and Methods The site is well described and Data are in detail. In similar style are presented the Spectral analysis and Random Forest and Change Detection

3. Results describe well what the data show (in tables -Table 3 :Variable importance across dates, Table 4: Class error and final model accuracy across dates and maps - Fig. 4 Maps produced by the random forest classification, Fig. 7 Maps highlighting areas where landcover change is most prominent.as well as graphics: Fig. 5 Percent cover for each landcover classes in CSMR stacked by date and Fig. 6 Difference of landcover class area (ha) compared to pre-flow conditions)

4. Discussion. Assesses observed trends and explains in details the significance of the results:Model Accuracy, Landcover Change and Ecological Implications and Limitations and Challenges.

5. Conclusions the main objectives seem to have been achieved

 

 

Author Response

All page numbers refer to the revised manuscript file with track changes on.

 The paper 'Shifts in Salt Marsh Vegetation Landcover After Debris Flow Deposition' by Silva et al. is well-written and has a high originality note.

Author response: Thank you!

1. The Introduction summarizes recent research related to the topic and establishes the originality of the research aims by demonstrating the need for investigations in the topic area.

Anyway, the paragraph 26-34 needs to be moved to Material and Methods

Author response: Thank you for suggesting this change. This paragraph was moved to be included with site description and the sub-heading changed to “Event and Site Description”. We felt it was still important to mention the event in the introduction and have inserted a short sentence to fill the gap left from moving the paragraph. See page 3.

45-51 repeats in detail the previous paragraph

58-65 repeats in detail the previous paragraph

Author Response: Thank you for pointing out the added detail. We believe that the added detail helps explain the concepts in the earlier parts of the paragraph and are different and elaborative enough to not be considered redundant detail. Thus we have chosen to keep them in the text.  

77-82 the idea is sufficient and well argued in the previous paragraph so it would not be needed anymore

Author Response: Thank you for pointing this out. We agree that the idea was well argued and removed the lines to remove the excess arguments for the idea.  See page 2.

2. Materials and Methods: The site is well described and Data are in detail. In similar style are presented the Spectral analysis and Random Forest and Change Detection
3. Results describe well what the data show (in tables -Table 3: Variable importance across dates, Table 4: Class error and final model accuracy across dates and maps - Fig. 4 Maps produced by the random forest classification, Fig. 7 Maps highlighting areas where landcover change is most prominent.as well as graphics: Fig. 5 Percent cover for each landcover classes in CSMR stacked by date and Fig. 6 Difference of landcover class area (ha) compared to pre-flow conditions)
4. Discussion. Assesses observed trends and explains in details the significance of the results: Model Accuracy, Landcover Change and Ecological Implications and Limitations and Challenges.
5. Conclusions the main objectives seem to have been achieved

Author Response: Thank you!

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors:

        This paper discusses the changes in vegetation coverage of salt marshes after debris flow deposition. The research topic has research value. The random forest model and other research methods used are more reasonable, and the research ideas are relatively clear. It is a good article and is recommended for inclusion and publication. Here are some suggestions for the author's reference:

1 Some of the pictures are not clear enough, you can modify the resolution of the chart.

2 This paper does not carry out descriptive statistics on the variables used. It is recommended that the author sort out and add a variable descriptive statistics, including maximum value, minimum value, mean value, etc.

3 The article lacks policy inspiration, whether this part can be added to improve the practical significance of the article research, and also provide some reference for solving such environmental problems in other regions of the world.

Best regards!

Author Response

All page numbers refer to the revised manuscript file with track changes on.

Dear authors:

This paper discusses the changes in vegetation coverage of salt marshes after debris flow deposition. The research topic has research value. The random forest model and other research methods used are more reasonable, and the research ideas are relatively clear. It is a good article and is recommended for inclusion and publication. Here are some suggestions for the author's reference:

Author response: Thank you!

1 Some of the pictures are not clear enough, you can modify the resolution of the chart.

Author response: Thank you for pointing this out. We have gone ahead and recreated the images at a higher resolution and adjusted other parameters to improve clarity. They should be much easier to see than the previous iteration.

2 This paper does not carry out descriptive statistics on the variables used. It is recommended that the author sort out and add a variable descriptive statistics, including maximum value, minimum value, mean value, etc.

Author response: As was suggested, we have conducted descriptive statistics on the training data variables. This will be added to the manuscript as a supplementary table.

3 The article lacks policy inspiration, whether this part can be added to improve the practical significance of the article research, and also provide some reference for solving such environmental problems in other regions of the world.

Author response: We agree that policy is an important part of management, however, we also could not see any clear policy implications from this work that could be discussed at breadth in this manuscript, beyond possibly assisted restoration. We added a line in the discussion that mentions this in the Ecological implications subheading to address this. See page15, line 434.

Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript:
Shifts in Salt Marsh Vegetation Landcover After Debris Flow Deposition

submitted by:
Germán D. Silva, Dar A. Roberts, Joseph P. McFadden and Jennifer Y. King

In 2018, Carpinteria Salt Marsh Reserve received a large quantity of sediment following debris flows in Montecito, California. Because disturbances potentially impact the ecosystem services and functions that wetlands provide, an understanding of how the ecosystem responded to the debris flows is important for the management of salt marsh systems.

In the article, the Authors present results using remote sensing techniques and show that disturbance due to debris flows may affect ecosystem function via plant community change. These impacts will need to be taken into consideration when managing wetlands prone to depositional events.
The structure of the manuscript is considered and clear. In the introduction, the background and comprehensive review of the problem's literature were presented. The Authors present site and data description and correction, spectral analysis and random forest and change detection. Results of the research have been presented in graphic form. Conclusions, on the basis of the research, are clear. 

Following suggestions should be taken into consideration:
Line 42: References should be numbered [6-8] on the basis ot the instruction for Authors
Line 56: References should be numbered [6,7,10-13]
Line 74: ferences should be numbered [8,10,11,13,15-19]
Table 1: I suggest to move units of resolution in first row: Resolution (m) nd delete "m" in second column. Central Wavelength (nm) and Bandwidth (nm)are in third and fourth columns
Fig. 2: Axes don't have units
Equations 1, 2: They should be presented using equation editor with fraction bar; please note, that the star is used for convolution, the dot should be used for multiplication
Tables 2,3: in Table 2 date is presented in following form: 17-Nov, but in Table 3: Nov-17; should be standarized

Author Response

All page numbers refer to the revised manuscript file with track changes on.

The structure of the manuscript is considered and clear. In the introduction, the background and comprehensive review of the problem's literature were presented. The Authors present site and data description and correction, spectral analysis and random forest and change detection. Results of the research have been presented in graphic form. Conclusions, on the basis of the research, are clear.

Author response: Thank you!

Following suggestions should be taken into consideration:

Line 42: References should be numbered [6-8] on the basis of the instruction for Authors

Line 56: References should be numbered [6,7,10-13]

Line 74: ferences should be numbered [8,10,11,13,15-19]

Author response: Thank you for pointing out this error. We have gone through and corrected references so that they are all correctly formatted in the manuscript.

Table 1: I suggest to move units of resolution in first row: Resolution (m) nd delete "m" in second column. Central Wavelength (nm) and Bandwidth (nm)are in third and fourth columns

Author response: Thank you for offering this correction. We have edited the column titles to reflect this suggestion and for a more standardized look for Table 1. See Page 8.

Fig. 2: Axes don't have units

Author response: Thank you for pointing out the missing units. The x-axis title was changed to include units from “Wavelegnth” to “Wavelength (nm)”. Reflectance does not have units and therefore the y-axis title was left as is.  See Page 6.

Equations 1, 2: They should be presented using equation editor with fraction bar; please note, that the star is used for convolution, the dot should be used for multiplication

Author response: Thank you for pointing out the error in the equation. We recreated the equations in the equation editor so that we could properly use the fraction bar and changed the star operator to the dot operator to properly represent the multiplication. See Page 7.

Tables 2,3: in Table 2 date is presented in following form: 17-Nov, but in Table 3: Nov-17; should be standardized

Author response: Thank you for pointing out this difference. We have standardized how we abbreviate the dates to the “Nov-17” format, this is also reflected in the new supplementary table. See Page 8.