Driving Factors of the Hydrological Response of a Tropical Watershed: The Ankavia River Basin in Madagascar

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

1.  (374-383) not a very good discussion of the boxplots.  It is not clear as to the value of these.

2.  (400-404)  you need to have a more descriptive discussion of the outlier.

3.  (577-602)  you need to discuss how the results would apply outside of the small region of the Ankavis watershed.   Are the results somewhat valuable throughout Madagascar?

4.  Discuss why the correlation of 0.5 is considered the cutoff.  It seems that it would be dependent on the sample size.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Please find in attached our response to your comments and suggestions.

Sincerely,

Zonirina Ramahaimandimby

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

1The research work done by the authors is highly appreciated. A large amount of data has been collected which is main hurdle in executing research work over many parts of the world. Plausible analysis has been made and highly useful results have been provided. Incorporating my following suggestions may improve the quality of the manuscript

    A) Minor typo improvements may enhance the quality of the paper. I have given below a few examples of typo improvements below. I request the authors to read once again carefully the whole manuscript and remove the typo mistakes as I have pointed out below as a sample.

Abstract

Line No 9 Kindly change “Understanding the hydrological behavior of watersheds and”      to “Understanding the hydrological behavior of watersheds (WS) and”

Kindly change “SAVA region” to “Sava region”

Kindly change “CD extracted from topography/morphology (T),”     to    “CD (extracted from topography/morphology (T)),

B) Many related papers have been published during 2022-2023. I suggest to include few publications from 2023, cite these and discuss please. I have given below a few as a sample:

Geng, Q.; Liu, H.; He, X.; Tian, Z. Integrating Blue and Green Water to Identify Matching Characteristics of Agricultural Water and Land Resources in China. Water 2022, 14, 685. https://doi.org/10.3390/w14050685.

Liu Y, Yang S, Meng L, Liu T, Zhu M, Ou X, Xiong Y and Labat D (2023), How did blue and green water resource evolute spatially and temporally in the Meijiang River Basin, China? Front. Earth Sci. 11:1130520. doi: 10.3389/feart.2023.1130520.

Liu, M., Wang, D., Chen, X. et al. Impacts of climate variability and land use on the blue and green water resources in a subtropical basin of China. Sci Rep 12, 20993 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-21880-3.

Eaton, W.M., Brasier, K.J., Burbach, M.E. et al. A new approach for studying social, behavioral, and environmental change through stakeholder engagement in water resource management. J Environ Stud Sci (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-023-00835-8.

Maíra Ometto Bezerra, Derek Vollmer, Nicholas J. Souter, Kashif Shaad, Sarah Hauck, Maria Clara Marques, Silindile Mtshali, Natalia Acero, Yiqing Zhang, Eddy Mendoza, 2023, Stakeholder engagement and knowledge co-production for better watershed management with the Freshwater Health Index, Current Research in Environmental Sustainability, Volume 5, 100206, doi.org/10.1016/j.crsust.2022.100206.

Kong, M.; Zhao, J.; Zang, C.; Li, Y.; Deng, J. Characteristics and Driving Mechanism of Water Resources Trend Change in Hanjiang River Basin. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2023, 20, 3764. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph20043764.

C)  Although some old publications play a pioneer role and we must include these, but some old publications showing some known ideas can be avoided in citation to reduce the list of references. I suggest authors to look into carefully and reduce the number of references by deleting some old unnecessary references.

 

 

    A) Minor typo improvements may enhance the quality of the paper. I have given below a few examples of typo improvements below. I request the authors to read once again carefully the whole manuscript and remove the typo mistakes as I have pointed out below as a sample.

Abstract

Line No 9 Kindly change “Understanding the hydrological behavior of watersheds and”      to “Understanding the hydrological behavior of watersheds (WS) and”

Kindly change “SAVA region” to “Sava region”

Kindly change “CD extracted from topography/morphology (T),”     to    “CD (extracted from topography/morphology (T)),

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Please find in attached our response to your comments and suggestions.

Sincerely,

Zonirina Ramahaimandimby

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

This is a nice paper, examining relationships between catchment characteristics and hydrologic response for four catchments in Madagascar. The literature review is very comprehensive and while I think the authors have misunderstood parts of the literature (see comments below), this can be remedied.

In general, these sorts of studies have been done many times before (as per the large literature referred to by the authors), but I think that the novelty in this paper lies in investigating relationships in Madagascar which is largely unstudied.

Major comments

Line 171. Upon reading these lines I first wrote: “Some more detail on the set up of the gauging stations would be good in order to better understand their reliability, particularly at low flows which are difficult to monitor well. For example, did they take velocity measurements to derive the rating curve? Is the site in a rocky outcrop (which would make low flows more reliable)?” I now see this information in Section 2.5 and Appendix A. I’d still like to know more about the site in terms of rock bars etc to be able to assess the low flow characteristics better.

I appreciate the issues in getting high flow gauging measurements. It would be good to show in Appendix A the maximum levels recorded in the period of record to know how big a problem there is in the high flow extrapolation.

Also, how long was the period of record? Seems to be 10 months which is quite short, although perhaps long enough to derive the hydrological response characteristics used.

Section 3.2.4. Why is there such a large range of some characteristics, such as runoff coefficient? Was this calculated for each event separately? An assessment of the average over the whole period of record would also be good.

Lines 435 onwards. These runoff coefficients from the literature are for a range of catchment sizes. The authors need to recognise that in general runoff coefficients get smaller as catchment areas increase, therefore a like for like comparison is not really appropriate here.

The assessment of runoff coefficients from around the world are also misleading. For example, the study from Australia is not in an arid or semi-arid region as the text says. Rather it is in a cool temperate mountainous region. In general, arid regions do not have rugged topography. The authors might also check that the other catchments are in the climatic and terrain type stated in the paper.

Minor comments

Line 119. Are these daily maximum temperatures (I think so), or daily average temperatures? I know Madagascar is hot, but I don’t think it’s that hot.

Line 283. Spelling error in Table 3 ‘calculation’.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Please find in attached our response to your comments and suggestions.

Sincerely,

Zonirina Ramahaimandimby

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper is nearly acceptable in present form in my opinion. I opted for a minor revision only because of the non-perfect formula expression (suggesting to correct the multiplication sign which was rendered as digit comma) and advising to add some of the formulation used to compute the hydrological signatures (suggesting to add a section in appendix to not overload the text).

The question addressed is the hydrological response of a tropical watershed in a specific geographical area. The topic is not original but the contribution to some extent relevant in the field. Apart from the information about the specific geographical area, the paper provides interesting information about the correlation existing the hydrological markers and the geographical and  geological features as well as the land cover. In my opinion no improvements should be considered regarding the methodology as well as no other controls. The conclusions appear consistent to me and point clearly to the main question posed.

I would suggest minor revisions concerning the writing of formulas (multiplication signs as points) and the specification of the formulas of some quantities used as hydrological characteristics, expanding the appendix

In my opinion, the paper is written clearly and to the point, in fluent and clear English. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Please find in attached our response to your comments and suggestions.

Sincerely,

Zonirina Ramahaimandimby

Author Response File: Author Response.docx