Rice-Fallow Targeting for Cropping Intensification through Geospatial Technologies in the Rice Belt of Northeast India

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This draft suggests a very valuable topic in sustainability of Indian rice production. Meanwhile, this manuscript is well written in logic and language. This paper was focused on the application of geospatial technology in estimating the potential of crop production in Assam. Authors indicate that geospatial technology could be used for identifying and targeting suitable rice-fallow. Additionally, the new suggested production mode helps to increase the productivity and profitability. Before this paper reconsider for publication, there were some suggestions must be improved.

1.    Combining lines 31-59 and lines lines 83-95, these two paragraphs are related to the importance of rice in India and the reason why developing this study. Then shorten them, it is too redundant.

2.    Removing lines 110-112, it is not necessary.

3.    The resolution of all figures applied in this draft are not good, redrew them carefully.

4.    Line 132: ‘We’ is not suitable in academic article, recheck the total draft and improve them.

5.    Line 195:  How to obtain soil moisture? Why does author choose soil moisture as the only limited factor?

6.    Lines 236-238: Rewrite this sentence, it should be added in the related figure legend.

7.    Line 268: How to determine the soil moisture is suitable?

This draft suggests a very valuable topic in sustainability of Indian rice production. Meanwhile, this manuscript is well written in logic and language. This paper was focused on the application of geospatial technology in estimating the potential of crop production in Assam. Authors indicate that geospatial technology could be used for identifying and targeting suitable rice-fallow. Additionally, the new suggested production mode helps to increase the productivity and profitability. Before this paper reconsider for publication, there were some suggestions must be improved.

1.    Combining lines 31-59 and lines lines 83-95, these two paragraphs are related to the importance of rice in India and the reason why developing this study. Then shorten them, it is too redundant.

2.    Removing lines 110-112, it is not necessary.

3.    The resolution of all figures applied in this draft are not good, redrew them carefully.

4.    Line 132: ‘We’ is not suitable in academic article, recheck the total draft and improve them.

5.    Line 195:  How to obtain soil moisture? Why does author choose soil moisture as the only limited factor?

6.    Lines 236-238: Rewrite this sentence, it should be added in the related figure legend.

7.    Line 268: How to determine the soil moisture is suitable?

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for providing your valuable suggestions, which helped in improving the manuscript significantly. I am attaching the point-by-point response to your suggestions.

best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

 Just to contribute to the work improvement, I make the following recommendations:

1.The Keywords - Normally, I understand that keywords should preferably contain expressions that do not appear in the title of the work. “Rice”, “Rice-fallow”; “geospatial technologies” all these terms are already in the title. “soil moisture”; “maize” are ok. “intensification”? of what? “Crop-intensification” seems much better. Could be put Landsat, Sentinel (radar) ... and so on.

2.  Use of national/regional expressions such as “kharif season” “rabi season” “Sali” “Boro” (???) and others, which the authors highlighted in italics and appear in whole text, starting in the abstract and are not properly explained and makes it difficult to understand, especially for who is a foreigner reader.

I strongly recommend:

ü  or avoid using these expressions by replacing them with universal expressions like "rainy season” for example. Maybe reversing and putting the regional expression in parentheses rainy season (kharif) and so on…

ü  or put a footnote at the beginning of the article explaining to the reader the meaning of these expressions.

ü  and or explain in the text like this explanation that I extracted from another work: “India has three major cropping seasons called Kharif/Rainy (June to October), Rabi/Winter (November to April), and Zaid/Summer (April to June/July)”.

3. Conclusions - I recommend that the authors objectively describe only the conclusions reached by the work, in response to the 3 objectives explained: We aim to answer the characterization and targeting of rice fallow by understanding: (i) which variables govern the existence of rice-fallow and how effectively rice and rice-fallow areas can be mapped through earth observation data?(ii) how spatiotemporal variability of soil moisture be used for targeting agronomic interventions for cropping intensification? And (iii) do the targeted agronomic trials, accomplished in suitable rice fallow, indicate the potential of introducing short/medium duration crops sustenance?

In this section the authors make many recommendations and generic conclusions that are pertinent but should be described in another section as: "final considerations", for example.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for providing your valuable suggestions, which helped in improving the manuscript significantly. I am attaching the point-by-point response to your suggestions.

best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors unnecessarily focused too much on explaining rice-fallow conditions in their study area, while almost completely disregarding the geospatial technologies (as primary novelty to present research). The performed machine learning classification is either not explained at all or explained so blurry that the reproducibility by other scientists is not possible. Moreover, some terminology which the authors used (especially in subsection 2.3.2.) implies that they are potentially not highly competent in geospatial technologies, which damages the scientific contribution of this study. The performed methodology is either performed in a shallow manner or severely lacks clear description of the input data, spatial resolution, classification method, its parameters, and accuracy assessment metrics for each component of the study.

Please insert a reference to support climate data stated in subsection 2.1.

The rice area mapping (subsection 2.3.1.), as one of the fundamental steps in this study, was performed in a non-scientific approach. The selection of random forest for classification, as well as the accuracy assessment metrics were not addressed nor justified. In my opinion, a few more classification methods should be evaluated to determine the optimal results. Also, you did not mention any parameters for the random forest classification, meaning that the readers cannot evaluate robustness of this approach and it badly affects repeatability of the proposed approach.

In the 2.3.2. subsection, there is almost no explanation on the actual mapping methodology, which means that it cannot be reproduced by other scientists. “Spectrally variable signatures”, cross-validation with high-resolution Google Earth images (?!) imply that this approach is obsolete and potentially resulted in unreliable data.

The authors use three remote sensing data sources but fail to state spatial resolution of their results, which are dependent on one another. Also, no mention of the downscaling of their spatial resolution remains unclear about the exact methodology they used, which degrades reproducibility of this method further.

The authors should check if the figures in the manuscript are in at least 300 dpi resolution as most of them appear too blurry. Some figures (Figure 4) are also unnecessarily deformed.

English language quality can be improved slightly in writing but otherwise it is decent.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for providing your valuable suggestions, which helped in improving the manuscript significantly. I am attaching the point-by-point response to your suggestions.

best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

No further comments.

No further comments.

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors addressed my comments in the revised version of the manuscript. I have nothing to add.