Articles | Volume 25, issue 12
https://doi.org/10.5194/nhess-25-4755-2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Using network science to evaluate landslide hazards on Big Sur Coast, California, USA
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- Final revised paper (published on 01 Dec 2025)
- Preprint (discussion started on 22 Jan 2025)
Interactive discussion
Status: closed
Comment types: AC – author | RC – referee | CC – community | EC – editor | CEC – chief editor
| : Report abuse
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-2979', Anonymous Referee #1, 21 Mar 2025
- AC1: 'Reply on RC1', Vrinda Desai, 14 May 2025
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RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-2979', Anonymous Referee #2, 09 Apr 2025
- AC2: 'Reply on RC2', Vrinda Desai, 14 May 2025
Peer review completion
AR – Author's response | RR – Referee report | ED – Editor decision | EF – Editorial file upload
ED: Reconsider after major revisions (further review by editor and referees) (26 May 2025) by Olivier Dewitte
AR by Vrinda Desai on behalf of the Authors (18 Jul 2025)
Author's response
Author's tracked changes
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ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (01 Aug 2025) by Olivier Dewitte
RR by Antoine Dille (05 Aug 2025)
RR by Anonymous Referee #3 (09 Oct 2025)
ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (15 Oct 2025) by Olivier Dewitte
AR by Vrinda Desai on behalf of the Authors (25 Oct 2025)
Author's response
Author's tracked changes
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ED: Publish as is (04 Nov 2025) by Olivier Dewitte
AR by Vrinda Desai on behalf of the Authors (10 Nov 2025)
Manuscript
Thank you for your innovative work. I have some comments and questions that I listed below:
Line 2 (and throughout the paper): the term "vulnerability" might be misused in the context of risk science (e.g. no estimate is made of infrastructure fragility). I would argue that the terms to be used are "hazard" and "exposure” depending on the context.
Line 13: Palmer (2017) refers to slow-landslide specifically and the definition of which specific process the current paper is addressing is not clear at this point
Line 22: please see my comment above - "mass movement of material (rock, earth, debris) down the hillslope, defined as a landslide event". It would be good to define specifically the process under study here. It is not only a semantic problem as rock fall, landslides, debris flow processes are mechanically and spatially different.
Line 26-28: Can you check the https://blogbigsur (Drabinski and Bertola) reference- I couldn't access the reference mentioned. Any other scientific publication available?
Line 29 : More background information about network science would be good to have here - e.g. Nodes, Edges etc. Why is a network framework interesting in this case?
Line 31 : "two categories: stable and vulnerable. A region is considered vulnerable if it is likely to experience a landslide event" - see my comment above - "susceptible" might be more appropriate?
Figure 1: a minimap of the location in the state / country would be nice for a geomorphologic context
Line 64: it is unclear to which "mass downslope movement" you are referring to here. The link between slow moving landslide and evidence of associated mass movement is missing
Line 70: 1) 40x40 m2 should be 40m2 or 40x40m, I believe 2) The temporal resolution is not explicit
Line 90: How much of the total area represent the mask? Can it impact the analysis?
Line 105: A representation of the graph and communities would be important for the comprehension
Line 106: A Poisson sampling with Delaunay triangulation is unlikely to follow a hydro-geomorphologic logic - would there be an advantage in using slope units as the basis for the nodes/edges for example (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geomorph.2020.107124)?
Line 109: "we calculated the average velocity and slope of any two connected nodes and set that as the edge weight" - Are the community distribution sensitive to a metric different than the average (e.g. Maximum, Skewness, Kurtosis)?
Line 113: More details are needed about the GenLouvain algorithm
Line 125: In the case of a catastrophic failure (Millions m3), I would expect several communities involved to remain stable while bordering communities would see an increase in Z values - correct?
Is there any (albeit rare) scenarios where the Z-score could, for example, average out and be misleading?
Line 138: Can you be more explicit of what a Z < 0 would actually mean?
Line 140-145: It is not clear to me over which period the average community persistence is calculated; is it a rolling average?
Line 148: "Here, darker sub-regions represent higher peak Z-scores. sub-regions with a relatively stable Z-score had peak Z < 2.5. Within the sub-regions that showed increasing Z, some sub-regions have peak Z < 3, and some have peak Z " - can you be more explicit about the 1 to 4 categories shown on Figure 2c?
Figure 2b: the asterisks are really small
Line 159: The Multivariate analysis should probably be introduced in the methodological section with the result explained in the Result section. A Discussion section could then be added before the conclusion
4.1 Multivariate Analysis: Can you clean this paragraph, as there are several discrepancies and it makes it hard to follow: e.g. "Community persistence exhibits positive correlations with mean displacement (-0.53)", "Moreover, precipitation has a strong positive correlation by 0.63 with precipitation"
Figure 3: Could you add a ROC plot and AUC score from the Z-score and events?
Line 202: "we analyzed two time periods:Nov 2015 to Nov 2022 and Nov 2015 to Feb 2023" the two analysis periods remains unclear in term of their relationship or purpose
Line 206: The 97% is coming out of the blue and not convincing (as you pointed out) and consider, from what I understood, a single threshold. See above my comment on the ROC curve. Could you iterate the threshold with various scoring metrics to identify an optimal threshold and provide a better selling point for your method?
Line 217: Correct "(Oregon State Univeristy, 2015) with velocity and slope in S2" - presumably Supplementary Information 2?
Line 221: What is the result of the WRF-Hydro model doing in the Conclusion section? it seems out of place
The Conclusion looks more like a Discussion + Conclusion and the conclusion lacks specific recommendations for practical implementation
Overall the landslide inventories and their uses remains unclear and need to be addressed