Landscape Damage Effect Impacts on Natural Environment and Recreational Benefits in Bikeway

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Some improvements in english language.

Author Response

Dear reviewer 1

We appreciate your helpful comments, and guidance to revise the manuscript.

The manuscript has been carefully edited by the authors with particular attention paid on the grammatical errors of the original manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report

In general, the paper has a well-written introduction and literature review. And, after that, the point of the research is lost.

The main problem of the paper is that too many methodologies were trying to use. Hence, no one of methodologies is explained good enough, so conclusions are weak.

For instance, the main conclusion is that environment is important for cyclists, especially landscape. So the authors concluded that if the landscape is damaged, then this path will not be used so often, precisely the number of trips will decrease for 1.01 time. Well, of course, cyclists will use the cycle road that has a nice environment; this is not new insights. And authors know that because they write that in the introduction. But we don't know what the main socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents are. And for instance, how many time they use this trail in a year, have they use this trail before? This information is essential for making conclusions. We also don't know when the research was carried out: before, during or after the soil conservation project. Paper also need many technical improvements. For instance:

• line 58-59 and 70-72 need to be written in the Methodology
• line 93 to 96 need to be written in Conclusion
• from line 134 and further many references are mixed, 34 is not correct; it needs to be 34 etc.
• line 138-139 - Sentence need to be written in Methodology
• line 160 to 162 need to be written in Methodology
• from line 205 to 214 needs to be written in the Methodology
• line 203 it is not Tong-Fon, need to be written Dong-Fon
• in Principal Component Analysis, we say that we have "components" not "factorial dimensions."
• Table 1. it is better to write Principal Component Analysis
• line 215 - you need to indicate what items were excluded from the analysis
• from line 237 - when you mention the hypothesis it is good to indicate the hypothesises before in the Methodology
• line 258-259 mention source of information
• line 248 - 250 - ? - Beautiful landscapes usually do not have lighting facilities, and you usually do not ride a bike at night to see a landscape.
• line 261-266 - Not very well explained. What does this mean?
• in the References, some references are not written in a proper manner for instance line 352 and 353, an 402-403
• NT$ needs to be changed in the dollar (for comparison).

Author Response

 

We appreciate your helpful comments, and guidance to revise the manuscript. The manuscript has been revised according to their recommendations. We hope the following explanations answer all your suggestions.

 

1. We added a table in the appendix to provide information about the socio-demographic characteristics of the respondents (line 378 in the revision manuscript). After the trees were destroyed, 50.5 percent the respondents would not ride bicycles on Dong-Feng bikeway (added line 262-264 in the revision manuscript). In according to Taiwan Tourism Bureau’s statistics, the total number of tourists visited Dong-Feng bikeway were 10,000,813 in 2018, and the number was decreased to 9,933,514 in 2019(added line 360-362 in the revision manuscript).
2. Line 58-59, 70-72, 138-139, 160-162, and 205-214, were moved to methodology (line 187-200 in the revision manuscript).
3. Line 93-96 are now written in Conclusion (line 348-350 in the revision manuscript).
4. We replaced reference #8 with Lamont (2009), and the origin reference #8, Lamont and Buultjens (2011) was moved to reference #33. This corrects the error of reference #34 in line 135.
5. We replaced Tong-Fon with Dong-Feng (line 213 in the original manuscript).
6. In Principal Component Analysis, "factorial dimensions." are replaced with "components".
7. We changed the title of Table 1 to Principal Component Analysis.
8. The dropped items are toilet number, toilet location, trash can number, trash can location, congestion, and local specialty products.
9. The hypothesis in line 237 is the hypothesis of the estimation model. We rewrote the sentence as “The good-of-fit test revealed that the null hypothesis of estimation model is all independent variables coefficient being equal to zero, which is rejected at the 0.01 significance level.” (line 292-295 in the revision manuscript)
10. The source of the information in line 258-259 is from Taiwan Tourism Bureau’s statistical database of tourism. We rewrote the sentence as “Based on Taiwan Tourism Bureau’s statistics in 2018, the number of tourists who had visited the bikeway was 10 million, thus the total recreational benefits were decreased by NT$1,320 million.” (line 317-319 in the revision manuscript)
11. In line 248-250, since “Lighting Facility” was the lowest one among all the components, this study made an effort to investigate improving the hypothetical condition. This was reflected in the survey, which is listed Table 1 of the Appendix.
12. Line 261-262 is about the result of Yeh’s et al. (2019) research. We rewrote the sentence as “Their research also revealed that the number of times cyclists riding on the bikeway would increase to 3.12 times under the contingent hypothetic scenario of landscape improvement.”, and “However, in this study it was found that after the landscape was destroyed, the number would be decreased to 1 time.” (line 319-324 in the revision manuscript)
13. For line 352-353, and 402-403, the format of reference has been corrected.
14. The exchange rate can be found in Table 2..

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The study points out the importance of preserving the values of landscape and nature, which play an important role also in the use of cycling routes. Calculating the recreational benefits and, on the other hand, the costs influenced by damaged landscapes makes a significant contribution to raising awareness of sensitive approaches to the environment and landscape, essential for sustainable development and a healthy and livable environment.

I recommend adding Figure 1 in higher resolution.

 

Author Response

We appreciate theyour helpful comments, and guidance to revise the manuscript. The manuscript has been revised according to their recommendations. We hope the following explanations answer all your suggestions.

 

The photos are enlarged so that the images are clearer to readers.

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

In Conclusion, it would be useful to mention if the research methodologies were appropriate and recommend future research.

Author Response

We appreciate the reviewer’ helpful comments. The manuscript has been revised according to the recommendation of reviewer.

To reviewer 2,

We added a description about the methodology and recommend future research as following (from line 374 to 382):

“Since the environmental effect and recreational benefits of cyclists cannot be estimated by market price, only the non-market goods method is suitable for the job. In this case, contingent behavior questions were added to TCM to measure both the landscape damage effect and the recreational benefits of cyclists simultaneously. However, the limitation of this study is that the study did not conduct a survey on non-visitors. Future research may follow the contingent behavior model(CBM) of Whitehead et al. (2000) combining current data and contingent behavior data to evaluate the effect of quality improvement or deterioration [38]. In addition, CBM can introduce non-visitors’ samples to test potential structural change in the recreational demand of new participants offering more information to the research.”