the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 08 Jan 2024
A geomorphological slope unit dataset for the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau
Abstract. Geomorphological slope units represent the polygonal units on the digital terrain that are jointly segmented by valley and ridgelines. In contrast to the grid cells commonly used in traditional spatial analyses, slope units have an explicit geomorphological and environmental implication and capture the topographic characteristics of different units comparatively faithfully, which is being increasingly extensively used in the investigation of natural hazards, ecological processes and environmental impacts. However, delineating slope units on a widespread regional scale remains challenging, especially in areas such as the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau, which is characterized by considerable spatial heterogeneity of topography and fragile ecological environments. To enable more researchers to focus more conveniently on the subject matter to be addressed itself, rather than being caught up in the slope unit delineation. The present study delineates and produces a dataset of high-precision geomorphological slope units for the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau based on the publicly available high-resolution DEM data. A total of 446,497 slope units were derived, representing an area of 350,000 square kilometres. To facilitate the application of this geomorphological slope unit dataset by researchers, we use it for landslide susceptibility assessment and perform an insightful evaluation and comparison with the results of the traditional mapping units. The dataset of this geomorphological slope unit demonstrates good performance in terms of overall scale, sample scale and unit scale. It is available in Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24457144.v1 (Zheng et al.,2023) and could be used as fundamental data for the investigation of disasters, environment and ecology in the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.
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RC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-485', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Jan 2024
I have read the manuscript “A geomorphological slope unit dataset for the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau” by Zheng et al. with great interest. Although the proposed method seems interesting and useful, the paper suffers of poor language, lack of proper structure, and unclear presentation of method and data. In particular, sentences are often written in a poor English, with complicated or wrong words, which make the reading (and especially the understanding) of the work very difficult. The grammatic structure is often not correct and many sentences need to be rewritten. The method section is poorly explained. It is not clear how slope units are defined and how they differ from watersheds. Also, the definition of slope units should be part of the method section, and not a new chapter. The selection of the 16 influencing factors, what is based on? literature? There is no reference for this selection in the method.
It is not clear how the Authors used the Google images to account for possible future landslides. There is no explanation of this in the paper, although it is a fundamental part to be able to evaluate the result of their analyses in comparison with other methods. Because of this missing information, the final results are difficult to evaluate, and the conclusions are not link to the data.
The data available in the dataset (as shapefiles) are divided into 3 groups. The attributes of the slope units in the 3 groups are different, in numbers and names, and the names are no informative of the content. As they are, they are useless. It would be necessary to have a separate file that explains the content of the attribute tables and the meaning of the chosen names. Also, it would be nice to have all the 16 influencing parameters included in the table, maybe as a numerical result of the logistic regression, in a way that for each slope unit it may be possible to evaluate the influence of each factor on the final probability value (which, among the other things, it is NOT reported in the attribute table).
I would recommend an intense rephrasing of the paper, especially the introduction and method sections, which need to be simplified and better explained. Also, the authors should introduce all missing information and better explain how they reached the presented results. The dataset needs to be improved, in content and in the explanation of how to use the data. As it is, the work requires a major revision.
More specific comments follow below.
Please specify how “slope units” differ from “watersheds” and, if they are different, please provide a better definition for slope units.
Figure 5 and 6 and all the discussion concerning the better performance of slope units compared to grid units is based on the actual landslide points and some other landslide points of which the origin is not explained – or not sufficiently explained. This makes it difficult to understand the real performance of this method.
Lines 18-19: “To enable more researchers to focus more conveniently on the subject matter to be addressed itself, rather than being caught up in the slope unit delineation.” This sentence is not grammatically correct. Please check.
Line 28: slope units are the areas …
Lines 28-29: please rephrase, what does it mean “the basic topographic units of natural geological hazards”? not clear.
Line 29: hazard evolution? Do you mean, hazard evaluation? If not, please specify what hazard evolution means for you – based on climatic changes? Naturally evolve in time? Not clear.
Lines 30-31: this sentence is odd: possibly change to “Due to the intense tectonic activity and complex topography of the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau, steep slopes are prone to deformation and failure”. Please check.
Line 34: “the mapping units regarded as the sampling units” not clear. What do you mean with sampling unit, the areas normally used to perform topographic analysis? Please clarify.
Line 37: what do you mean with “geological environments”? if the grid units are basically the areas of a single grid cell, I would say that the biggest problem here is the raster resolution. Are we talking about DEMs? Then, if a grid cell represents an area of 30x30m, of course it will average all topographic features aver a large area. If resolution is of few meters, then the definition of topographic features can have high spatial definition.
Lines 41-42: I still did not get how slope units are defined, and what is meant with geological environments. Besides the benefits of using slope units, it would be nice to also know the disadvantages. I guess that raster resolution still remains an important limitation.
Lines 43-44: this sentence is written in a strange English, please rephrase.
Line 45: please add, GIS software.
Line 46: Hydrological tools are available for several GIS software, not only for ArcGIS. Additionally, these tools are those generally used to define watersheds, and I still did not get how slope units differ from them.
Line 47: This sentence is written in an awkward English. Please check. Also, “r.slopeunits” seems a function of the R software, or one implemented in QGIS. Please, remove the word software after it.
Line 48: which new method?
Line 49-50: how is, having different sources and resolution, a problem for slope unit extractions?
Line 51-52: this sentence is awkward, with repetitions. Please rephrase.
Lines 43-54: I understand the intention of the authors, to provide a background for the utility of their work, but this paragraph is written in a very poor English, and it is really hard to understand. I strongly recommend rewriting it.
Lines 55-60: please write areas as plural.
Line 58: DEM with low resolution – not small scale. Resolution and scale are different things.
Line 60: areas as plural. Please here, and throughout the paper, avoid using geological disaster. Use instead geological hazards.
Lines 62-63: please rewrite – this sentence is repetitive and odd. How would your new database overcome the limitations for their application in small areas?
Line 65: is this resolution a high resolution compared to data normally used for the Tibetan plateau?
Lines 66-67: “And the error part of slope units ??? was manually modified which were delineated from the water surface ???”. I do not understand this sentence. What are you talking about? Shouldn’t this go in the method section?
Line 81: what is the vertical and horizontal distribution of rivers?
Lines 82-83: the monsoon is the main air mass for precipitation transport.
Line 97: remove DEM from main DEM data. DEM stays for Digital Elevation Model, here it is intended as RASTER.
Line 100: what kind of information provide the GDP?
Line 103: are freely available, or are available for free
Line 111: what do you mean with geographical environment, can’t you just say, within the study area?
Line 114: DEMs is plural, which are indicative …
Line 115: with level? Better to specify, with the horizon, or horizontal level
Line 116: please specify what aspect is. Not only which values it may have.
Line 117: you mean, the aspect, not the slope. How is precipitation influenced by the aspect (or the slope)?
Line 118; the forces of slope material ?? what is it? You mean cohesion? Please rephrase
Line 123: active faults may be a triggering factor – please rephrase
Line 124: which same way?
Line 126: “The mean annual temperature data are represented by the temperature index” what does it mean?
Line 127: what are the unstable structure in rocks? Do you mean faults?
Line 128: “Rainfall is usually the factor inducing landslides” it may be, or at least provide a reference for this.
Line 130: please explain what GDP is – more precisely.
Line 152: do you mean “slope units”?
Lines 152-153: “landslide events account for 2.17% of non-landslide events, which can be considered rare events.” not clear. Maybe rephrase, “landslide events are found in only the 2.17% of the total slope units, and can thus be considered as rare events” (if I have understood correctly what you wrote)
Lines 152-156: I am sorry, I do not understand what you are doing here. Please add description and details.
Lines 157-160: this is not clear. Please rephrase. What span, those of the model? Write down the correspondence between degree and m2. What is referred to as geographical environment? Please clarify. What are the “internal and external forces of the landform”??
Line 163: isn’t this still part of the method?
Line 165: unique-conditions units, were not described as “administrative units” in the introduction – please be consistent.
Line 169: “limiting by the geographic irrelevance.” what does it mean?
Line 170: terrain trends, do you mean terrain features?
Lines 168-171: but you can say this after you have shown your results, not now! This is something that should go in the discussion.
Line 172: what is “water system extraction”?
Line 174: “Valley line and ridge line layers are superimposed to obtain slope units” How?
Line 175-176: no, you use the fill depression function to allow water to run out of any real or fake depression, otherwise the other GIS functions will not work.
Line 177: “as the flow rate”?? flow accumulation is not the same thing as flow rate
Lines 177-179: this is a repetition, please simplify.
Line 179: decomposed??? Please change word.
Line 180-181: it is not clear what is meant by flow rate. Also, change catchment depression with catchment outlet or confluence. It is not clear what catchment depression is.
Line 182: isn’t the valley line the same thing as the river? Not clear.
Line 183. Still it is not clear how slope units are defined and created.
Line 198: landslide occurrence probability?
Lines 197-206: please rephrase, or simply add this data in a table
Line 212: the slope toes on both sides of the river banks are or get eroded
Line 213: for terrain reasons? Which means? Do you have any reference or measuring data to assess this?
Line 214: still avoid disaster – which implies more things happening that a “simple” landslide
Lines 220-230: report data in a table
Line 232: have you done any statistical trend to assess the non-significancy ?
Line 235: amplification? Please change word
Line 234-245: It would be nice to see not only the difference between slope units and grid units, but also between slope units and real landslide and grid units and real landslides. Additionally, in figure 4, it would help to see the DEM below the slope and grid units to have an idea of the local topography.
Table 2: please add lines to help the reader following rows.
Lines 275-284: it is not clear, nor has not been explained, how you used the google images to identify possible landslide points in areas with no actual landslides. So all of the discussion about figures 5 and 6 is no informative.
Lines 285-286: of course … they are based on the same units, why would there be overlapping?
Line 324: I am lost – please repeat here what unit scale refers to. Also, it would be nice to know at the beginning of the paper that you are going to do this other “test”. Thus, not only compare the results of slope units and grid units but also explore the most important factors within your selected 16 influencing factors.
Dataset.
The 3 shapefiles have different attribute tables. Names and number of fields do not correspond, and it is not clear what they refer to. As it is, the dataset is difficult to use by other people.
Basin up
Basin mid
Basin down
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-485-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
We would like to thank the referee for the time and effort they put in to review the first version of our manuscript. Their constructive comments enabled us to improve the quality and clarity of the manuscript. We have checked the grammar and spelling errors of the manuscript. Please find our answers to the points raised below.
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AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
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RC2: 'Comment on essd-2023-485', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Feb 2024
The manuscript entitled „A geomorphological slope unit dataset for the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau” by Zheng et al. is a morphometric analysis aiming at delineating the geomorphological slope units for the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The authors presented the methodology of automatic delineation of slope units and explained how the slope units might be suitable for geological/geomorphological disaster research. Landslide susceptibility assessment in the study area was chosen as an example to illustrate the advantages of the slope units assessment, compared to those of the commonly used grid units assessment.
At first glance, the topic of the study looks appealing, but an in-depth reading reveals that the study has many shortcomings and inconsistencies. Some sentences lack of clarity and consequently their meaning is not easely understood. Other sentences seem to be too long, and need to be shortened. The manuscript text requires definetely to be checked for grammar and spelling errors, to improve the English language.
Some specific comments are provided below:
Line 15 (in the Abstract): „...topographic characteristics of different units comparatively faithfully, which is being increasingly extensively...” Here, you used too many, useless adjectives; you should rephrase this sentence.
„To enable more researchers to focus more conveniently on the subject matter to be addressed itself, rather than being caught up in the slope unit delineation”. This sentence does not have clear meaning for me, please rephrase.
Line 30: The sentence „Due to the intense tectonic activity and complex topography of the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau, the deformation and failure of steep slopes are prone to slide” is not related to the previous one. It would be better to find another place and move this sentence, for example after the Line 55.
Line 82: What means „a relative height difference of more than 1000 m”? Is it the relative elevation between the top and the bottom of the canyon? Be more concise and use the specific terms for altitude values (either relative altitudes, or altitude a.s.l.).
Lines 85-86: You describe here the climate conditions in the study area „with dry winters, wet summers and obvious wet‒dry seasons”. This description is very imprecise and needs more details about the climate conditions at regional and local scales.
Line 89: You stated that, in the study area „landslides are widespread”. You followed the description of the landslide types (line 90) explaining that „They are mostly fast-moving slide-type and flow-type movements, and rapid-moving landslides are also abundant”. This is, again, very imprecise and needs more clarification of the terms referring to landslides you used.
Multiple landslide types exist, depending on their type of movement. You should be more explicite and clearly mention in the description all the types of landslides occurring in your study area.
Lines 110-133: Here you mentionned the 16 conditionning factors taken into consideration to assess the landslide susceptibility. But, how did you chose to analyze the type and number of these conditionning factors? For different lanslide types you should consider to analyse different conditionning factors. A conditionning factor favoring a type of landslide will not necessary favor other landslide type. Knowing the different landslide types occurring in the study area is therefore essential, to select the conditionning factors for each landslide type that should be included into the susceptibility analysis.
Lines 270 and 285: Here you mentioned the „actual observed landslide points”. I understand that the landslides in your analysis are located as points on your map. How did you chose the location of the point, is it within the centre of the the landslide area? All grid units statistics are conditionned by the way in which you located the landslide point on the map. A particular grid unit will contain, or not a landslide point, depending on how this point was located on the map. You should provide detailed information about the location of landslide points and how the location of these points potentially overestimate/underestimate the landslide susceptibility discrimination in the grid units vs. slope units.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-485-RC2 -
AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-485/essd-2023-485-AC2-supplement.pdf
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AC3: 'Reply on RC2', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
We would like to thank the referee for the time and effort they put in to review the first version of our manuscript. Their constructive comments enabled us to improve the quality and clarity of the manuscript. Actually, according to the suggestion of the RC1, we redefined our units into the geomorphic units which are more reasonable. We have checked the grammar and spelling errors of the manuscript. Please find our answers to the points raised below.
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AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
Status: closed
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RC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-485', Anonymous Referee #1, 30 Jan 2024
I have read the manuscript “A geomorphological slope unit dataset for the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau” by Zheng et al. with great interest. Although the proposed method seems interesting and useful, the paper suffers of poor language, lack of proper structure, and unclear presentation of method and data. In particular, sentences are often written in a poor English, with complicated or wrong words, which make the reading (and especially the understanding) of the work very difficult. The grammatic structure is often not correct and many sentences need to be rewritten. The method section is poorly explained. It is not clear how slope units are defined and how they differ from watersheds. Also, the definition of slope units should be part of the method section, and not a new chapter. The selection of the 16 influencing factors, what is based on? literature? There is no reference for this selection in the method.
It is not clear how the Authors used the Google images to account for possible future landslides. There is no explanation of this in the paper, although it is a fundamental part to be able to evaluate the result of their analyses in comparison with other methods. Because of this missing information, the final results are difficult to evaluate, and the conclusions are not link to the data.
The data available in the dataset (as shapefiles) are divided into 3 groups. The attributes of the slope units in the 3 groups are different, in numbers and names, and the names are no informative of the content. As they are, they are useless. It would be necessary to have a separate file that explains the content of the attribute tables and the meaning of the chosen names. Also, it would be nice to have all the 16 influencing parameters included in the table, maybe as a numerical result of the logistic regression, in a way that for each slope unit it may be possible to evaluate the influence of each factor on the final probability value (which, among the other things, it is NOT reported in the attribute table).
I would recommend an intense rephrasing of the paper, especially the introduction and method sections, which need to be simplified and better explained. Also, the authors should introduce all missing information and better explain how they reached the presented results. The dataset needs to be improved, in content and in the explanation of how to use the data. As it is, the work requires a major revision.
More specific comments follow below.
Please specify how “slope units” differ from “watersheds” and, if they are different, please provide a better definition for slope units.
Figure 5 and 6 and all the discussion concerning the better performance of slope units compared to grid units is based on the actual landslide points and some other landslide points of which the origin is not explained – or not sufficiently explained. This makes it difficult to understand the real performance of this method.
Lines 18-19: “To enable more researchers to focus more conveniently on the subject matter to be addressed itself, rather than being caught up in the slope unit delineation.” This sentence is not grammatically correct. Please check.
Line 28: slope units are the areas …
Lines 28-29: please rephrase, what does it mean “the basic topographic units of natural geological hazards”? not clear.
Line 29: hazard evolution? Do you mean, hazard evaluation? If not, please specify what hazard evolution means for you – based on climatic changes? Naturally evolve in time? Not clear.
Lines 30-31: this sentence is odd: possibly change to “Due to the intense tectonic activity and complex topography of the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau, steep slopes are prone to deformation and failure”. Please check.
Line 34: “the mapping units regarded as the sampling units” not clear. What do you mean with sampling unit, the areas normally used to perform topographic analysis? Please clarify.
Line 37: what do you mean with “geological environments”? if the grid units are basically the areas of a single grid cell, I would say that the biggest problem here is the raster resolution. Are we talking about DEMs? Then, if a grid cell represents an area of 30x30m, of course it will average all topographic features aver a large area. If resolution is of few meters, then the definition of topographic features can have high spatial definition.
Lines 41-42: I still did not get how slope units are defined, and what is meant with geological environments. Besides the benefits of using slope units, it would be nice to also know the disadvantages. I guess that raster resolution still remains an important limitation.
Lines 43-44: this sentence is written in a strange English, please rephrase.
Line 45: please add, GIS software.
Line 46: Hydrological tools are available for several GIS software, not only for ArcGIS. Additionally, these tools are those generally used to define watersheds, and I still did not get how slope units differ from them.
Line 47: This sentence is written in an awkward English. Please check. Also, “r.slopeunits” seems a function of the R software, or one implemented in QGIS. Please, remove the word software after it.
Line 48: which new method?
Line 49-50: how is, having different sources and resolution, a problem for slope unit extractions?
Line 51-52: this sentence is awkward, with repetitions. Please rephrase.
Lines 43-54: I understand the intention of the authors, to provide a background for the utility of their work, but this paragraph is written in a very poor English, and it is really hard to understand. I strongly recommend rewriting it.
Lines 55-60: please write areas as plural.
Line 58: DEM with low resolution – not small scale. Resolution and scale are different things.
Line 60: areas as plural. Please here, and throughout the paper, avoid using geological disaster. Use instead geological hazards.
Lines 62-63: please rewrite – this sentence is repetitive and odd. How would your new database overcome the limitations for their application in small areas?
Line 65: is this resolution a high resolution compared to data normally used for the Tibetan plateau?
Lines 66-67: “And the error part of slope units ??? was manually modified which were delineated from the water surface ???”. I do not understand this sentence. What are you talking about? Shouldn’t this go in the method section?
Line 81: what is the vertical and horizontal distribution of rivers?
Lines 82-83: the monsoon is the main air mass for precipitation transport.
Line 97: remove DEM from main DEM data. DEM stays for Digital Elevation Model, here it is intended as RASTER.
Line 100: what kind of information provide the GDP?
Line 103: are freely available, or are available for free
Line 111: what do you mean with geographical environment, can’t you just say, within the study area?
Line 114: DEMs is plural, which are indicative …
Line 115: with level? Better to specify, with the horizon, or horizontal level
Line 116: please specify what aspect is. Not only which values it may have.
Line 117: you mean, the aspect, not the slope. How is precipitation influenced by the aspect (or the slope)?
Line 118; the forces of slope material ?? what is it? You mean cohesion? Please rephrase
Line 123: active faults may be a triggering factor – please rephrase
Line 124: which same way?
Line 126: “The mean annual temperature data are represented by the temperature index” what does it mean?
Line 127: what are the unstable structure in rocks? Do you mean faults?
Line 128: “Rainfall is usually the factor inducing landslides” it may be, or at least provide a reference for this.
Line 130: please explain what GDP is – more precisely.
Line 152: do you mean “slope units”?
Lines 152-153: “landslide events account for 2.17% of non-landslide events, which can be considered rare events.” not clear. Maybe rephrase, “landslide events are found in only the 2.17% of the total slope units, and can thus be considered as rare events” (if I have understood correctly what you wrote)
Lines 152-156: I am sorry, I do not understand what you are doing here. Please add description and details.
Lines 157-160: this is not clear. Please rephrase. What span, those of the model? Write down the correspondence between degree and m2. What is referred to as geographical environment? Please clarify. What are the “internal and external forces of the landform”??
Line 163: isn’t this still part of the method?
Line 165: unique-conditions units, were not described as “administrative units” in the introduction – please be consistent.
Line 169: “limiting by the geographic irrelevance.” what does it mean?
Line 170: terrain trends, do you mean terrain features?
Lines 168-171: but you can say this after you have shown your results, not now! This is something that should go in the discussion.
Line 172: what is “water system extraction”?
Line 174: “Valley line and ridge line layers are superimposed to obtain slope units” How?
Line 175-176: no, you use the fill depression function to allow water to run out of any real or fake depression, otherwise the other GIS functions will not work.
Line 177: “as the flow rate”?? flow accumulation is not the same thing as flow rate
Lines 177-179: this is a repetition, please simplify.
Line 179: decomposed??? Please change word.
Line 180-181: it is not clear what is meant by flow rate. Also, change catchment depression with catchment outlet or confluence. It is not clear what catchment depression is.
Line 182: isn’t the valley line the same thing as the river? Not clear.
Line 183. Still it is not clear how slope units are defined and created.
Line 198: landslide occurrence probability?
Lines 197-206: please rephrase, or simply add this data in a table
Line 212: the slope toes on both sides of the river banks are or get eroded
Line 213: for terrain reasons? Which means? Do you have any reference or measuring data to assess this?
Line 214: still avoid disaster – which implies more things happening that a “simple” landslide
Lines 220-230: report data in a table
Line 232: have you done any statistical trend to assess the non-significancy ?
Line 235: amplification? Please change word
Line 234-245: It would be nice to see not only the difference between slope units and grid units, but also between slope units and real landslide and grid units and real landslides. Additionally, in figure 4, it would help to see the DEM below the slope and grid units to have an idea of the local topography.
Table 2: please add lines to help the reader following rows.
Lines 275-284: it is not clear, nor has not been explained, how you used the google images to identify possible landslide points in areas with no actual landslides. So all of the discussion about figures 5 and 6 is no informative.
Lines 285-286: of course … they are based on the same units, why would there be overlapping?
Line 324: I am lost – please repeat here what unit scale refers to. Also, it would be nice to know at the beginning of the paper that you are going to do this other “test”. Thus, not only compare the results of slope units and grid units but also explore the most important factors within your selected 16 influencing factors.
Dataset.
The 3 shapefiles have different attribute tables. Names and number of fields do not correspond, and it is not clear what they refer to. As it is, the dataset is difficult to use by other people.
Basin up
Basin mid
Basin down
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-485-RC1 -
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
We would like to thank the referee for the time and effort they put in to review the first version of our manuscript. Their constructive comments enabled us to improve the quality and clarity of the manuscript. We have checked the grammar and spelling errors of the manuscript. Please find our answers to the points raised below.
-
AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
-
RC2: 'Comment on essd-2023-485', Anonymous Referee #2, 07 Feb 2024
The manuscript entitled „A geomorphological slope unit dataset for the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau” by Zheng et al. is a morphometric analysis aiming at delineating the geomorphological slope units for the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau. The authors presented the methodology of automatic delineation of slope units and explained how the slope units might be suitable for geological/geomorphological disaster research. Landslide susceptibility assessment in the study area was chosen as an example to illustrate the advantages of the slope units assessment, compared to those of the commonly used grid units assessment.
At first glance, the topic of the study looks appealing, but an in-depth reading reveals that the study has many shortcomings and inconsistencies. Some sentences lack of clarity and consequently their meaning is not easely understood. Other sentences seem to be too long, and need to be shortened. The manuscript text requires definetely to be checked for grammar and spelling errors, to improve the English language.
Some specific comments are provided below:
Line 15 (in the Abstract): „...topographic characteristics of different units comparatively faithfully, which is being increasingly extensively...” Here, you used too many, useless adjectives; you should rephrase this sentence.
„To enable more researchers to focus more conveniently on the subject matter to be addressed itself, rather than being caught up in the slope unit delineation”. This sentence does not have clear meaning for me, please rephrase.
Line 30: The sentence „Due to the intense tectonic activity and complex topography of the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau, the deformation and failure of steep slopes are prone to slide” is not related to the previous one. It would be better to find another place and move this sentence, for example after the Line 55.
Line 82: What means „a relative height difference of more than 1000 m”? Is it the relative elevation between the top and the bottom of the canyon? Be more concise and use the specific terms for altitude values (either relative altitudes, or altitude a.s.l.).
Lines 85-86: You describe here the climate conditions in the study area „with dry winters, wet summers and obvious wet‒dry seasons”. This description is very imprecise and needs more details about the climate conditions at regional and local scales.
Line 89: You stated that, in the study area „landslides are widespread”. You followed the description of the landslide types (line 90) explaining that „They are mostly fast-moving slide-type and flow-type movements, and rapid-moving landslides are also abundant”. This is, again, very imprecise and needs more clarification of the terms referring to landslides you used.
Multiple landslide types exist, depending on their type of movement. You should be more explicite and clearly mention in the description all the types of landslides occurring in your study area.
Lines 110-133: Here you mentionned the 16 conditionning factors taken into consideration to assess the landslide susceptibility. But, how did you chose to analyze the type and number of these conditionning factors? For different lanslide types you should consider to analyse different conditionning factors. A conditionning factor favoring a type of landslide will not necessary favor other landslide type. Knowing the different landslide types occurring in the study area is therefore essential, to select the conditionning factors for each landslide type that should be included into the susceptibility analysis.
Lines 270 and 285: Here you mentioned the „actual observed landslide points”. I understand that the landslides in your analysis are located as points on your map. How did you chose the location of the point, is it within the centre of the the landslide area? All grid units statistics are conditionned by the way in which you located the landslide point on the map. A particular grid unit will contain, or not a landslide point, depending on how this point was located on the map. You should provide detailed information about the location of landslide points and how the location of these points potentially overestimate/underestimate the landslide susceptibility discrimination in the grid units vs. slope units.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-485-RC2 -
AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://essd.copernicus.org/preprints/essd-2023-485/essd-2023-485-AC2-supplement.pdf
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AC3: 'Reply on RC2', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
We would like to thank the referee for the time and effort they put in to review the first version of our manuscript. Their constructive comments enabled us to improve the quality and clarity of the manuscript. Actually, according to the suggestion of the RC1, we redefined our units into the geomorphic units which are more reasonable. We have checked the grammar and spelling errors of the manuscript. Please find our answers to the points raised below.
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AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Zheng Xiangyi, 06 Apr 2024
Data sets
A geomorphological slope unit dataset for the eastern edge of Tibetan Plateau Xiangyi Zheng, Ying Wang, and Jing Qi https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24457144
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