PONE-D-20-11323

Spatial association analysis between landslides and environmental factors based on geographical detector in southeastern of Tibet Plateau, China

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. jia,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Shamsuddin Shahid

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

All the reviewers believe the article is interesting. However, they asked for deeper review of literature, improvement of English language and quality of figures. I completely agree with all the comments of the reviewers. Particularly, I believe literature review is really very shallow. Numerous studies have been conducted to understand the environmental factors responsible for landslides. Many of them published in PLOS ONE. Authors need to provide a deeper literature review and establish the novelty of the study clearly.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Comments for Authors

The manuscript “Spatial association analysis between landslides and environmental factors based on geographical detector in southeastern of Tibet Plateau, China” present an interesting study on detecting landslides, and their prevention or mitigation. The manuscript is well structured and nicely presented. However, I have some observations and comments for the authors as follows.

Topic

Authors should remove ‘of’ in the topic or put include ‘part’ before ‘of’

Introduction

Line 51 – 53: Change ‘resulting’ to ‘resulted’

Line 53: remove ‘in the’ before upstream

Line 58 – 60: One inverted comma is after China, where is the one before?

Line 70 – 75: Through data …… Sentence should be split into two.

There are other grammatical errors in this section, authors should please check and make corrections.

Study area and data

Line 120: change ‘blocked’ to ‘trapped’ and change ‘condensation’ to ‘condenses’. Please check and use appropriate words and check other grammatical errors.

Line 131: change ‘immigrated’ to ‘brought’.

Is there any map of the study area? I suggest authors include one.

Change ‘geology environment’ to ‘geological environment’.

Landslide inventory

Line 166 - 167: change ‘combining’ to ‘combined’ and change ‘identify’ to ‘identification’.

Line 172 – 174: Is this sentence not the same/almost the same as the one in line 153 – 155? If it is, then it should be deleted or the earlier one can be referred to if need be.

Line 184: change ‘main’ to ‘mainly’. Please check other typographical and grammatical errors.

Line 185: remove ‘et al’ and replace with ‘and so on’.

Line 199: what is been referred to as book here? If authors mean the ‘inventory’, this should be changed to ‘record’.

Environmental factors

Line 207: replace ‘predecessors’ with another word.

Line 215 – 216: authors cite some of the papers that have done these verifications.

Line 217: change ‘adapted’ to ‘considered’.

Table 2. shows there are 13 factors. Differentiate the Y variable from the 12 factors in the text.

Line 238: change ‘import’ to ‘important’.

Line 250: change ‘of our study area’ to ‘in our study area’

Line 253: change ‘show’ to ‘shown’.

Method

GeoDetector

Line 328: remove ‘other’

Results and Discussion

Landslides inventory and their spatial distribution

Line 354 – 356: authors should mention the reasons for the heterogeneity of the landslides in the area?

Line 356 – 361: why do these areas have higher concentrations of landslides?

Line 363 – 365: why is there more rock falls in the area? Are these due to the elevation/slope or the geology of the area?

Line 369 – 371: Authors should also mention the likely factors for these types of landslides in the area since there are different factors such as type of overburden/soil, slope and climatic factors.

Quantitative analysis of spatial association between the geological disasters with the environmental factors

Line 376 – 377: change heading to “Quantitative analysis of spatial association between geological disasters and environmental factors”

Line 378: This heading is not clear. Do the authors mean ‘significance and interaction of environmental factors?’

Line 392: put ‘of’ after because

Line 395: change ‘respecting’ to ‘with respect to’

Line 400: change ‘respecting’ to ‘with respect to’ in table. Also change other ones in the manuscript.

Line 415 - 423: authors should use comma at the appropriate places instead of ‘and’.

Identification of high risk areas of landslides and contrast between CF model and GeoDetector

Line 450: is this supposed to be expect or except?

Line 459 – 460: authors should give the possible reasons for the decrease in the probability of occurrence of landslide with altitude. Authors should mention why the risk detector value decreased with altitude higher than 5500m for collapse also.

Line 470: change ‘expect’ or ‘except’.

Line 487: change ‘same as’ to ‘similar to’.

Line 505 - 508: what could be the causes in these variations? Vegetation cover, depending on types has been suggested to prevent landslide. See following studies:

Kobayashi, Y., Mori, A.S. The Potential Role of Tree Diversity in Reducing Shallow Landslide Risk. Environmental Management 59, 807–815 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00267-017-0820-9

Mao et al (2012) Engineering ecological protection against landslides in diverse mountain forests: Choosing cohesion models. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2011.03.026

Line 553: use another word for ‘shortages’ e.g. use shortcomings.

Other comments

Authors should improve the texts in some of the figures that are not legible.

There are a lot grammatical and typographical errors in the manuscript. Authors should seek the help of a native or better English speaker to help improve the grammar of the manuscript.

Reviewer #2: The main objective of manuscript is to explore the spatial association between the landslides and the environmental factors in the southeastern part of Tibet Plateau. The subject of study is interesting and article is generally well structured. However, I would like to recommend the authors to improve the paper considering the following comments.

1-Many studies have been conducted to analysis influencing factors on landslides as a typical disaster in china. Author(s) also mentioned some of them in introduction section. The concluding remark of literature review in Introduction is “none of these studies would highlight the dominant factors or the interaction between the factors, and the existing landslides investigation is incomplete”. However, the new findings of this study should be clear and must compare to other studies in discussion and authors should emphasize on their new finding. Manuscript needs more about innovation and validation.

2-Geographical detector tool has applied to detect the dominant factors; this statistical method includes four parts which are risk detector, factor detector, ecological detector, and interaction detector. Author(s) are recommended to provide some information if other sophisticated methods are available to do such analysis and provide evidence for the significance and preference of their methodology based on other studies.

3-It is clear that different factors and multi-factor interaction can influence landslides, but the challenge is to find what those interactions are, how much influence of which factor, how the changes on those factors influence the changes of landslides and what can be the reasons of them. It is required to put more scientific interpretation of results and I suggest the authors to improve the discussion.

4- The quality of the figures is very poor. Please replace all with good ones. The figure1 were not defined in terms of A, B, C, D, F. Landslide inventory map can provide with good quality and the location of study area can be presented.

5- Grammar and English writing need to improve.

6-keywords should insert after abstract and before introduction.

7-For the link: http://www. GeoDetector.org, Please check as it does not exist, do you mean http://www.geodetector.cn/ ?

8- You May reconsider about your title as there is much similarity with below reference:

Yue, X. L., Wu, S. H., Huang, M., Gao, J. B., Yin, Y. H., Feng, A. Q., & Gu, X. P. (2018). Spatial association between landslides and environmental factors over Guizhou Karst Plateau, China. Journal of Mountain Science, 15(9), 1987-2000. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11629-018-4909-2

Reviewer #3: The authors of the manuscript “Spatial association analysis between landslides and environmental factors based on geographical detector in southeastern of Tibet Plateau, China” tried to investigate the number of landslides and their relationships with certain factors in southeastern of Tibet Plateau. They used geographical detector method and confirm its suitability with Certainty factor model. The study considered and remote sensing data obtained from different sources to conduct the study. Authors claimed that previous studies over the study area were limited in terms of data and mostly conducted over areas which were accessible. I explored the literature review and found that a large body of literature is available where studies are conducted similar to the objectives of present study over the study area. I believe authors should conduct a deeper literature review to highlight the gaps from previous studies. Almost all results of the study are based on remote sensing data, validation of the results of the study is important. Is there any possibility to validate the results of the study?. The spatial patterns of precipitation and temperature in figure (figure numbers are not given) looks different, please carefully check them. The quality of images are very poor, they must be improved as study is conducted based on those images. Figures should be properly numbers; it’s difficult to understand which figure are authors referring. The results of correlating factors are not clear. Authors should clearly provide the spatial correlation of landslides with environmental factors.

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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Reviewer note.pdf

PONE-D-20-11323R1

Analysis of the spatial association of geographical detector-based landslides and environmental factors in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, China

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. jia,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by May 10 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Shamsuddin Shahid

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

1) Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

2) Please state in your Methods section whether any permits were obtained for the field work, or if no field permits were obtained, a short statement as to why not.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have addressed all the comments and observations. However, I still have some few observations.

There are still some figures that the texts are not clear. Authors should make these texts legible.

Reviewer #2: The authors have adequately addressed the comments raised in the first round of review. The manuscript is more coherent now. It is interesting research and can be accepted for publication.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Mohammed Sanusi Shiru

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Comments to author1.docx

Analysis of the spatial association of geographical detector-based landslides and environmental factors in the southeastern Tibetan Plateau, China

PONE-D-20-11323R2

Dear Dr. jia,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Shamsuddin Shahid

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Authors have addressed the comments. Figures have been significantly improved and manucript can be considered for publication.

**********

7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: Yes: Mohammed Sanusi Shiru