Dear Dr. Zheng,

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 Jan 25 2026 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.

• 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,

Chong Xu

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf

2. Please provide additional details regarding participant consent. In the ethics statement in the Methods and online submission information, please ensure that you have specified (1) whether consent was informed and (2) what type you obtained (for instance, written or verbal, and if verbal, how it was documented and witnessed). If your study included minors, state whether you obtained consent from parents or guardians. If the need for consent was waived by the ethics committee, please include this information.

If you are reporting a retrospective study of medical records or archived samples, please ensure that you have discussed whether all data were fully anonymized before you accessed them and/or whether the IRB or ethics committee waived the requirement for informed consent. If patients provided informed written consent to have data from their medical records used in research, please include this information.

3. Please note that PLOS One has specific guidelines on code sharing for submissions in which author-generated code underpins the findings in the manuscript. In these cases, we expect all author-generated code to be made available without restrictions upon publication of the work. Please review our guidelines at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/materials-and-software-sharing#loc-sharing-code and ensure that your code is shared in a way that follows best practice and facilitates reproducibility and reuse.

4. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match.

When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section.

5. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests/Financial Disclosure section:

The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

We note that one or more of the authors are employed by a commercial company: Tianjin Huashui Engineering Consulting Co., Ltd

a. Please provide an amended Funding Statement declaring this commercial affiliation, as well as a statement regarding the Role of Funders in your study. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. You can update author roles in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form.

Please also include the following statement within your amended Funding Statement.

“The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.”

If your commercial affiliation did play a role in your study, please state and explain this role within your updated Funding Statement.

b. Please also provide an updated Competing Interests Statement declaring this commercial affiliation along with any other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, or marketed products, etc.

Within your Competing Interests Statement, please confirm that this commercial affiliation does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests) . If this adherence statement is not accurate and there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared.

Please include both an updated Funding Statement and Competing Interests Statement in your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf.

6. In this instance it seems there may be acceptable restrictions in place that prevent the public sharing of your minimal data. However, in line with our goal of ensuring long-term data availability to all interested researchers, PLOS’ Data Policy states that authors cannot be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-acceptable-data-sharing-methods).

Data requests to a non-author institutional point of contact, such as a data access or ethics committee, helps guarantee long term stability and availability of data. Providing interested researchers with a durable point of contact ensures data will be accessible even if an author changes email addresses, institutions, or becomes unavailable to answer requests.

Before we proceed with your manuscript, please also provide non-author contact information (phone/email/hyperlink) for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. If no institutional body is available to respond to requests for your minimal data, please consider if there any institutional representatives who did not collaborate in the study, and are not listed as authors on the manuscript, who would be able to hold the data and respond to external requests for data access? If so, please provide their contact information (i.e., email address). Please also provide details on how you will ensure persistent or long-term data storage and availability.

7. We note that Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 in your submission contain map/satellite images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright.

We require you to either (a) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (b) remove the figures from your submission:

a. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license.

We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text:

“I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.”

Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an ""Other"" file with your submission.

In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].”

b. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only.

The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful:

USGS National Map Viewer (public domain): http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (public domain): http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/

Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cia-maps-publications/index.html

NASA Earth Observatory (public domain): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

Landsat: http://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/

USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observatory and Science (EROS) Center) (public domain): http://eros.usgs.gov/#

Natural Earth (public domain): http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

8. If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

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

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

Reviewer #4: Partly

**********

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

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: I Don't Know

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

The PLOS Data policy

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

Reviewer #1: 1. Expand the study to include cities with different topographies, such as mountainous cities like Guiyang.

2. On line 256, the ratio of training to validation data is not specified. Please clarify this key experimental detail.

3. For large-area identification, even with high-resolution imagery, errors are inevitable. However, the paper does not address the error characteristics of the reference data, which is critical for evaluating the reliability of the proposed method.

4. The discussion section requires revision. Since five algorithms are mentioned, it would greatly enhance the persuasiveness of your work to compare your algorithm with these existing methods using the same study areas reported in their respective papers.

Reviewer #2: Please see the attached file. Address all of my comments and gicve response to each comment. Implementing these revisions can enhance the paper's clarity, engagement, and overall contribution to the field of urban land cover change assessment.

Reviewer #3: Manuscript Title: A Fine-grained Evaluation Framework for Urban Land Cover Change Based on UASFNet Data-driven Approach

he manuscript aims to create a data-driven framework for fine-scale urban land cover change assessment using an Urban Adaptive Shared-feature Attention Network (UASFNet). The intended contribution is to support urban spatial governance and ecological optimization by revealing the dynamic evolution of surface systems during urbanization, and this framework has potential value for scientists, planners, and environmental managers who rely on accurate change detection to inform policy and restoration decisions. However, in its current form, the manuscript does not sufficiently articulate testable scientific questions, nor does it clarify how the proposed framework is evaluated relative to existing methods or how each methodological component contributes to measurable improvements. In addition, while the abstract presents what it calls “experimental results,” the manuscript contains no dedicated Results section—only a Case Study—which makes it difficult to understand how findings were derived or how performance was objectively assessed. In my opinion, the Case Study should be removed, with its material reused so that its computational details are incorporated into the Methods while its model comparisons and land-cover disturbance findings are placed into a properly structured Results section. Strengthening these elements collectively would improve clarity, reproducibility, and the interpretability and impact of the work.

Major Comments by Section

Title:

The acronym UASFNet does not convey meaning to most readers and may obscure the paper’s intent. A more reader-focused alternative would be: “A Fine-grained Evaluation Framework for Urban Land Cover Change Based on Feature Monitoring with Remotely Sensed Imagery.” This revision communicates the achievement rather than emphasizing a technical acronym unfamiliar to the journal’s broad readership.

Abstract:

The abstract outlines the general workflow but omits crucial information about the type of remote sensing imagery required. Given the diversity of sensors, platforms, pixel sizes, and spectral characteristics, this omission limits interpretability and reproducibility.

The following components from the Case Study section should be incorporated into the abstract to clarify imagery requirements: Google Earth RGB imagery, 0.6 m resolution (Langfang dataset); Ultra–high-resolution TOP imagery, 5 cm GSD, multiple spectral combinations (Potsdam dataset); Standardized NAIP imagery for additional regional evaluation. Adding this information makes clear that the approach requires sub-meter to centimeter-scale RGB (and optionally IR) imagery characteristic of urban remote sensing segmentation tasks.

Introduction:

The final paragraph presents the study’s intended academic contributions, but these are not framed as testable scientific questions. For example, the introduction could explicitly pose questions such as:

Does UASFNet significantly outperform established semantic segmentation methods (e.g., ResNet, UNetformer, MFNet) in boundary preservation and inter-class separability for urban land cover types?

Does integrating AHP-derived indicator weights meaningfully improve the spatial coherence or interpretability of disturbance-level assessments?

Can combined pixel-level and region-level analyses provide a measurably more accurate or actionable representation of urban land cover change than existing pixel-only approaches?

Explicit questions would help readers understand what hypotheses the study is designed to test and how success is measured.

Methods:

sub-heading UASFNet Mathematical Formulation- The core equations for the UASF module—semantic–structural consistency kernel, gradient-domain formulation, and global gating operator—are insufficiently explained for a general audience. The manuscript introduces functions (ϕ(X), ϕ(∇X), Θ(X), A(X)) without an illustrative example.

The authors should include:

A worked example: Starting from a raw image tile, show how features, gradients, embeddings, and fused representations are extracted and transformed through each stage.

A schematic diagram showing how semantic and structural pathways merge and how gating weights are computed.

Code availability: Since PLOS ONE emphasizes reproducibility, the authors should provide code or pseudocode to clarify the transformations embodied in Equations (2) and (3).

Without such explanation, the method is not reproducible or interpretable by most readers.

sub-heading Evaluation Framework - The manuscript states that “multiple metrics” are used—mIoU, accuracy, F1, Kappa, etc.—but does not clearly tie these metrics to specific stated objectives (boundary preservation, inter-class separability, semantic consistency). The connection between objectives and metrics must be explicit. Similarly, the land cover change evaluation framework (using AHP to weight building, road, and greenbelt disturbance indices) would benefit from: A clear workflow diagram; A rationale for indicator selection; An explanation of how errors in land cover classification propagate into disturbance-level scoring.

Case Study Section

1. Section 3.2: “Experimental Detail”. This subsection belongs more naturally in Methods under a heading such as: “Computational Environment and Data Augmentation Strategy.”

The description of the GPU, Python environment, and augmentation techniques is overly brief and should be expanded with parameter values and more details for helping others evaluate, test, replicate, improve your work. There are standard components of deep learning methodology and are necessary for reproducibility.

2. Model Performance (currently part of Case Study)

This section actually constitutes Results, not a case study. The models used for comparison—ResNet, UNetformer, CMTFNet, CM-Unet, MFNet—should be introduced earlier in the Methods section under: “Benchmark Models and Comparative Evaluation Design.” Currently, the paper reads as though the evaluation details appear only after results, which makes the structure confusing.

3. Case Study Results: Land cover change interpretation

The manuscript presents tables of pixel-level and region-level disturbance statistics and interprets the spatial implications, but this should be more clearly labeled as Results, not embedded inside the case study narrative. The interpretation itself is appropriate and meaningful, showing both fine-scale and aggregated change patterns.

Objectivity of Performance Evaluation

Strengths: The manuscript compares UASFNet to five baseline models across three datasets (Langfang, Potsdam, NAIP). Metrics (mIoU, F1, Kappa) are standard for segmentation research. Improvements reported are consistent (≈1–3% advantage across categories).

Weaknesses: The evaluation is not explicitly tied to the stated objectives (e.g., boundary preservation, structural consistency). No statistical tests (e.g., paired t-tests on pixel accuracy, variance analyses across tiles) are reported to support claims of significance. The study does not examine failure cases, computational complexity trade-offs, or robustness to noise, which would strengthen claims of generalizability. The evaluation does not address whether the AHP-based disturbance metrics produce more accurate or actionable land cover change assessments than alternative weighting methods.

Conclusion on Objectivity: The manuscript does provide a comparative performance assessment, but it is only partially objective and not fully aligned with the evaluation goals described in the Methods section. Strengthening the study would require tighter linkage between model objectives and metrics, inclusion of statistical validation, and clearer articulation of how the proposed framework improves land cover change interpretation beyond classification accuracy alone.

Reviewer #4: Overall Comments

This paper presents a data mining-based method for identifying urban area changes from remote sensing images. The manuscript is generally well-written. The proposed method has been implemented on several areas and its performance has been compared with several common methods. However, revisions are necessary before publication.

Major Comments

1. Introduction/Literature Review: While a general categorization of research in the field is provided, a more focused review of studies directly related to the presented methodology is needed. This would establish a clearer baseline and context, allowing readers to better assess the novelty and contribution of the proposed method relative to existing work.

2. Research Objectives: The objectives stated at the end of the introduction should more explicitly highlight and emphasize the novel aspects of the proposed approach compared to previous studies.

3. Methodology Description (Clarity & Flow):

o Lines 111-113 / Overall Procedure: The description of the proposed method is somewhat vague. The specific steps of the pipeline should be clearly delineated. For each stage, it should be explicitly stated what processing is applied to the input, what the output is, and why this output is fed into the next stage. This lack of clarity is also reflected in the provided flowchart, making it difficult for the reader to follow the logical flow of the method.

o Justification of Weighting: The rationale and importance of using a weighting scheme (Lines 111-113, Line 180) are not sufficiently explained. A clear justification is required: Why is weighting crucial for identifying the target changes in this specific context? What problem does it solve that non-weighted approaches do not?

4. Methodology Subsections & Citations: The subsections under the methodology present various formulas and relationships without any citations to prior work. It appears that all elements were developed by the authors, which is unusual for a standard data mining/remote sensing workflow. Relevant sources for established techniques should be cited.

5. Subsection Structure (Lines 234-236): The inclusion of several very brief subsections with minimal content is not effective. Each subsection should contain substantive material related to its title.

Specific Comments on Figures and Tables

• Figure 1: The caption should be more detailed and specific, describing what the figure illustrates. This applies to all figure and table captions throughout the manuscript.

• Figure 3: The defined legend for this figure appears to be incorrect. Please verify and correct it.

• Table 2: It is unclear why all values for the proposed method are highlighted with a different color. Typically, only the best-performing values (e.g., highest accuracy) should be bolded or highlighted for clear comparison.

• Table 3: The methodology for generating the rankings is not described. How were these rankings obtained? Was a single expert used, or multiple experts? If multiple, how was consensus reached? This information is essential for assessing the validity of the comparison.

Recommendation

The paper addresses an interesting topic but requires significant revisions, primarily to improve the clarity, justification, and context of the proposed methodology, and to ensure rigorous presentation of results and comparisons. Addressing these points will strengthen the manuscript considerably.

**********

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: Yes: Muhammad Nasar AHMAD

Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes: Milad Janalipour

**********

[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.]

To ensure your figures meet our technical requirements, please review our figure guidelines: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures

You may also use PLOS’s free figure tool, NAAS, to help you prepare publication quality figures: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/figures#loc-tools-for-figure-preparation.

NAAS will assess whether your figures meet our technical requirements by comparing each figure against our figure specifications.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PONE-D-25-61989_Report.docx

A fine-grained evaluation framework for urban land cover change based on feature monitoring with remotely sensed imagery

PONE-D-25-61989R1

Dear Dr. Zheng,

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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager®  and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. For questions related to billing, please contact billing support .

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,

Chong Xu

Academic Editor

PLOS One

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

**********

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

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

The PLOS Data policy

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #3: I would like to thank the authors for their careful responses to my prior comments. The revisions have strengthened the manuscript. The goal was to make the contribution easier to interpret, reproduce, and evaluate relative to existing approaches.

**********

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 #3: No

**********