Supporting the Global Biodiversity Framework Monitoring with LUI, the Land Use Intensity Indicator

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

Manuscript has been improved. In row 211 the words 'the affected areas' should be changed in 'the disturbed areas'. After this change I think that ms deserves to be published. Regards.

Author Response

Done, of course.

Thank you for your review which helped to significantly improve the ms.

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

The authors have made good responses and modifications to the reviewer's comments one by one in the revised version. I have no further comments, thank you!

Author Response

Thank you for your review which indeed helped to improve the initial ms significantly.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The author suggests a land use intensity indicator to aid monitoring, reporting, and evaluation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

1-There are large literatures on land use indicators and frameworks including ecosystem services- natural capital, and land sharing-sparing papers that the author needs to say how their approach adds value.

2-There is little information on how their indicator would be set up, tested, and operationalized. At a time when there are an increasing number of real-time land cover-use datasets e.g. Planetary Computer 10m land cover https://planetarycomputer.microsoft.com/dataset/group/io-land-cover and Dynamic World https://www.dynamicworld.app/Land Cover.

Reviewer 2 Report

In this manuscript, the land use intensity index LUI is used to support the global biodiversity framework, which is a very meaningful topic. But for now, the manuscript looks more like a report than an article, proposing major revisions to its overall structure and content.

1. For the abstract section, the overall structure of this part is not clear enough for readers to quickly extract the corresponding research objectives, research objects, research content, etc.

2 For the introduction section, although elaborated the GBF framework and content, but for an academic paper, the introduction not only needs to explain the background of the research, but also needs to give an research review in this field, as well as the research gaps. These are not elaborated in this paper, it is suggested to strengthen.

3 In the section of methodology, the authors spend a lot of time on expanding the document index system adopted by the CBD COP, but it seems that this is only an introduction to the document and cannot be called research or the author's academic contribution. In addition, what role does this part play in this article?

4. The Land Use Intensity Index (LUI) is proposed by the author to support the global biodiversity framework with LUI. Therefore, this part should be used for demonstration and reasoning.

5. The author puts forward a set of LUI indicators, but lacks empirical part in terms of the structure of the paper.

6 On the whole, this paper is more like an introductory report rather than an academic paper. It is suggested to make substantial improvements according to the academic paper standard.

Reviewer 3 Report

Authors suggest a new indicator (LUI) with a simple and intuitively understandable structure, suitable for citizens’ science applications, and thus for participative monitoring when extensive statistical data gathering is not feasible. Manuscript lacks of quantitative analysis (it is a conceptual paper, mainly) but this is not a problem. This type of ms are wellcome for whose working in landscape planning and management. However, unfortunately, I have had some problems in the reading.  First: there is a lack of the concepts and references related to disturbance/threat/pressure/stress arenas. About the human impact and its related consequences (and terms) a large number of papers have been written. Neverteheless, many seminal authors (Sousa, White, Picketts, Fanelli...) and their theories have been not cited. Second: The text is poor fluently. Some sections aree too simple and intuitive, others very criptic or a bit fuzzy. I suggest to the authors a further reading and the involvement of other colleagues (in the acknowledgements, I read the ' ALARM project consortium' that could be have a role in helping you: please specify some name). Third: at least the terms of 'hemeroby' and 'naturalness', strictly related to the topic of this work (intensity of land use disturbance), should be reported with annexed references and concepts. Therefore, I suggest MAJOR REVISIONS. Below I have added some suggestions. I like to re-read a further version of this (good) manuscript. row 9: ' most ruthlessly'. i this that this term is not right (too dramatic) in this context. row 10 'what about 'ipbes'? row 19: what does 'sophisticated statistics' mean'? Why sophisticated? (perhaps 'detailed'?). However, I think that this indicator works also with few data available. Or not? rows 135-136: '. What is adequate use in one place (grazing, mowing, water lagging,…) can be too much pressure in another – it is the combination of ecosystem characteristics and use patterns which must be in a balance'. yes, but you should refer also to the different regimes of specific pressures which are different for different sites. In this regard, I would read somethings about this concept of 'disturbance regime', since this term has been never cited along the text: see the Salafsky et al., 2008' paper on Conserv Biol (on threat analysis) or the seminal handbook (2006) on the disturbance ecology (Springer) where this concept (and all the concepts related to the term 'pressure': perturbation, stress, threat, and so on) have been reported. row 189. The figure in this pages has not number. This figure is good and explicative. However, here and along the text I would read something about the concepts of hemeroby and naturalness. See  Environmental indices, system analysis approach, 237-254. available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Angela-Lausch/publication/237201744_Hemeroby_index_for_landscape_monitoring_and_evaluation/links/561a949808aea8036722b598/Hemeroby-index-for-landscape-monitoring-and-evaluation.pdf See also: Journal of Applied Ecology, 39(5), 708-720. at: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1046/j.1365-2664.2002.00746.x There are also applications of both the concepts (hemeroby and naturalness): see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1470160X1500583X and at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15659801.2013.924326   Finally, (i) an operational example could be wellcome and (ii)  please add the role of anonymous reviewers in improve the first draft of the manuscript. Have a nice work.