Research on Vegetation Cover Changes in Arid and Semi-Arid Region Based on a Spatio-Temporal Fusion Model
, Donghua Chen 2,3,*, Saisai Liu 2, Wutao Feng 1, Fengbing Lai 1, Hu Li 3,*, Chen Zou 3, Naiming Zhang 2 and Mei Zan 1
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
1: The keywords have a high repetition rate with the title, and it is suggested to modify some of them.
2: Figure 1 should highlight the geographical location of the study area in China.
3. It is recommended to add specific information about Landsat and MODIS data, including acquisition date, original spatial resolution and scene ID.
4: Update the references based on "Tianshan vegetation".
5: Update the content of discussion and conclusion based on the updated references.
Author Response
Please find attached the response to the reviewers' comments, thank you.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This study adopted the ESTARFM model to realize the fusion of Landsat and MODIS data, which supported the realization of long time series and high spatial resolution vegetation cover monitoring in complex terrain areas of Xinjiang, and used unary linear regression to analyze the overall change characteristics of vegetation cover in the past 15 years.
In general, this research is not very attractive. Similar work has been extensively carried out in other areas. The current manuscript only presents the results of the data analysis and does not give very interesting discussions or valuable conclusions. The manuscript would benefit from a more in-depth discussion of the potential impact of the study (in the Introduction). I think that the authors should instead spend more time describing why this study is important and different from others (global studies, other regional studies), and how specifically your methods will elucidate the analysis of spatiotemporal changes of FVC in this area that others have yet to do. Specifically, how does the understanding of the underlying mechanisms on the FVC change with respect to the various drivers in the studied region?
Below are some more specific suggestions or comments for the improving of the current version:
1) As shown in the manuscript, the study area is one of the areas with rich vegetation resources, and more than 40% of the entire study area with the FVC value of greater than 70%. Are the remote sensing NDVI values prone to saturation in these regions?
2) The ESTARFM model needs sets the suitable parameters and weights. How are these parameters and weights determined? It is necessary to present the fusion scheme of ESTARFM for the data in the manuscript.
3) Line 188-189 ” …the values of cumulative frequency 5% and 95% were selected to represent NDVI- soil and NDVI-veg, respectively…” Do NDVI-soil and NDVI-veg have the same value or different values for different years?
4) Line 232-233 “…. five typical 100×100 image subsets were selected for comparison between the fused NDVI data and the real Landsat NDVI data in this paper….” Where are these five typical image subsets distributed in the study area? It is best shown in Figure 2.
5) The main text could be shortened because many sentences or information are actually not necessary. Although the overall manuscript is not badly written, it would certainly be much improved if the English version were revised by a professional scientific English editing service.
Author Response
Please find attached the response to the reviewers' comments, thank you.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors endeavored to answer all questions and suggestions made by the reviewers. There remain a few minor points:
1) Tables 1 and 2 are suggested to be presented as Appendix tables.
2) Please improve the resolution of all figures.
3) There are still some occasional grammar errors throughout the manuscript, especially the article "the," "a," and "an" are missing in many places; please make a spellchecking in addition to these minor issues.
Author Response
Thank you very much for your professional comments on the manuscript, which have been valuable in improving the content and accuracy of the manuscript. Based on your comments, we have revised the relevant content of the manuscript. Please refer to the attached document for details.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
