PONE-D-21-39297Did Covid-19 lockdown positively affect the urban environment and UN- Sustainable Development Goals?PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Damásio,

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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Bailang Yu

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

I agree with the reviewers that the lockdown policy affects our environment but not all indicators. The authors should provide more information about the relationships between the policy and the variations of the indicators. 

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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: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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: No

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: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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: Title: Did Covid-19 lockdown positively affect the urban environment and UN-Sustainable Development Goals?

Manuscript Number: PONE-D-21-39297

Journal name: PLOS ONE

It is my pleasure to review the manuscript for the esteemed journal. In this manuscript, the authors investigated the effects of the lockdown impacts with regards to a set of urban environmental parameters (greenness, land surface temperature, night- time light, and energy consumption) in five alpha cities (Kuala Lumpur, Mexico, greater Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Toronto) about the environment-related UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) using an extensive questionnaire-based survey of expert opinions. The work presented is relevant to the Journal's field. The manuscript has got some potential. I would like to congratulate the author for a considerable amount of work that they have done. Especially, the author reported that the total lockdown was more effective in revitalizing the urban environment than partial lockdown. This manuscript has provided a new case to more comprehensive understanding th effects of lockdown on the environment in cities. However, the manuscript needs further improved before to be accepted for publication. The reviewer has listed some specific comments that might be helpful of the author to further enhance the quality of the manuscript. Please consider the particular comments listed below.

Comment 1: Abstract. Generally it should further underscore the scientific value added of your paper in your abstract. In addition, it seems that there are too many descriptions of the background and methods of the research, but the description of the results is too simplistic.

Comment 2: sections of Introduction. The novelty of this manuscript should be further justified by highlighting main contributions to the existing literature. This could be clearly presented in the introduction section. Please consider citing following papers which are related to your research: (i) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envres.2021.111990; (ii) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.127897; (iii) https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph18116053; (iv) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spc.2021.04.024; (v) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.126265. on one hand, the current introduction seems simple. One the other hand, there has already been a large amount of literatures discussing this topic. There is a need to better elaborate the contribution of the work to the existing literature.

Comment 3: sections of methodology. The section is well-structured and well-written. The detailed description of the method is impressive. However, it would be better to highlight your improvement of the method and your innovation in methods.

Comment 4: section of Result interpretation. The section is also well-written. However, it seems that there is no in-depth discussion in both Empirical Results and future research. It would be better to further discuss what your findings are different from the past works.

Comment 5: sections of conclusion. Please make sure your conclusions' section underscore the scientific value added of your paper, and/or the applicability of your findings/results, as indicated previously. Basically, you should enhance your contributions, limitations, underscore the scientific value added of your paper, and/or the applicability of your findings/results and future study in this session.

Comment 6: There are still some occasional grammar errors through the revised manuscript especially the article ''the'', ''a'' and ''an'' is missing in many places, please make a spellchecking in addition to these minor issues.

Comment 7: References. Please check the references in the text and the list; You should update the reference.

Reviewer #2: This paper explores impacts of lockdowns against COVID-19 epidemic on urban environment. The paper adopted remotely sensed indices and compared environmental changes before and after the lockdown periods. Although environmental impacts of this pandemic have been reported in numerous previous studies, this paper provides some useful information to assess and understand environmental influences of this pandemic. However, there are still many shortcomings should be improved before this paper is in consideration of publication.

Major concerns:

1. The lockdown policy indeed affects our environment, but not all indicators. In terms of specific indicators, it is encouraged to express clear routines from lockdown-related restrictions to environmental consequences. For example, the author adopted NDWI (water index) that was used to extract the area of water bodies. However, those lockdown-related restrictions did not affect the area of water bodies in a short time (several months or one year).

2. Why did the authors choose four indictors (NDWI, LST, NDVI, and NTL)? Are there any interrelationships among these four indicators? Or would you like to tell a combined story based on these four indicators? If the answer is not sure, maybe you should focus on one indicator in depth, such as the night-time lights.

3. More explanations on links between four indicators and UN-SDGs are encouraged in the Introduction section. In my opinion, there four indicators are weakly correlated to UN-SDGs.

4. Sub-sections and sub-titles of this paper are not arranged in a regular manner. I am confused that there is a “Results Interpretation” section and one more “Result” section. And also, other sub-titles are not concise and easy-reading.

Minors:

1. Why authors chose these five cities? Are they all alpha cities? Are they representative samples among alpha cities?

2. The results of experiments are compressed in only one figure (Fig. 2). Readers are hard to find differences of environments before and after lockdowns. The figure should be separated into several figures or you should pay attention to only one or two indicators.

Reviewer #3: This paper explored the positive effects of COVID-19 lockdown restrictions on environment-related SDGs. Some of the urban environment variables extracted from satellite images showed variation pre-, during, and post-lockdown. I found this topic interesting and would provide some valuable information. However, there are some flaws with the results that I hope the authors continue to work on methodologies to improve the results. Please see my comments below.

1.In the introduction section, the authors state that “Originated in Wuhan city of China in early December 2019, the Coronavirus disease that causes COVID-19 has global scale transmission.” As far as I know, the geographic origin of the COVID-19 virus has not yet been found, so the authors’ statement is not rigorous.

2.What are the exact date ranges of “pre-”, “post”- and “during” lockdown phases of each city? What are the corresponding dates of remote sensing images? For partial lockdown, what is the specific area of the lockdown? A more detailed formulation of the above questions could make the analysis more convincing.

3.In the result interpretation part, the authors describe the changes of urban environment variables. I suggest to represent them in the form of a table to make it clearer.

4.The reliability of the analysis results needs to be further improved. Firstly, the authors mainly use mean value to analyze the changes of urban environment variables in each city. I suggest that the authors further locate the areas with obvious changes, and analyze the reasons for the changes in combination with the land use situation. Secondly, according to the authors' analysis, most of the changes are caused by local weather rather than the lockdown measures. The current analysis can hardly support the conclusion that lockdown has an considerable impact on environment-related SDGs. More quantitative studies will need to be conducted with more related data.

5.To study the impact of partial lockdown on the city environment, I suggest that the authors further analyze the differences of environment variables within and outside the lockdown area.

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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.

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: 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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PONE-D-21-39297R1Did Covid-19 lockdown positively affect the urban environment and UN- Sustainable Development Goals?PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Damásio,

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 Aug 01 2022 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: https://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,

Bailang Yu

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments:

I agree with the reviewer 3's comments that the authors should recheck the reliability of the results.

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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

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

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

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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 incorporated comments from the first round of review. My concerns from my previous review have been addressed. I would recommend the paper to be accepted for publication. Thank you!

Reviewer #2: The author has revised the paper in response to my questions. There are 2 more issues that need further revision.

First, the abstract of the paper only describes some results and does not give a conclusion. Author(s) did not respond to the question in the title.

Second, the pictures in this paper do not meet the quality requirements for publication. As shown in Figure 1-5, it is recommended to cancel the labeling of latitude and longitude, and be sure to increase the font size in the figure.

Reviewer #3: The authors have modified the paper to address most of my comments. But I still insist that the reliability of the results needs to be further improved. It would be better to locate the areas with obvious changes, and analyze the reasons for the changes in combination with the land use situation. If no land use data is available, it is also possible to refer to Google Image data for analysis. In addition, I still think that most of the changes are caused by local weather rather than the lockdown measures according to the authors' analysis. It would be better to conduct more quantitative studies.

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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: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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[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.

Did Covid-19 lockdown positively affect the urban environment and UN- Sustainable Development Goals?

PONE-D-21-39297R2

Dear Dr. Damásio,

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,

Bailang Yu

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 #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: 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 #2: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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 #2: The author(s) have addressed all my concerns. I would like to suggest to accept this paper for publication in PloS One.

The following two newly published papers are for your reference, which are closely related to nighttime lights changes during the COVID-19 epidemic.

----Rowe, F., C. Robinson & N. Patias (2022) Sensing global changes in local patterns of energy consumption in cities during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Cities, 129, 103808.

----Xu, G., T. Xiu, X. Li, X. Liang & L. Jiao (2021) Lockdown Induced Night-Time Light Dynamics during the COVID-19 Epidemic in Global Megacities. International Journal of Applied Earth Observation and Geoinformation, 102, 1-10.

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

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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 #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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