Address feedback from the local review

Once local reviewers have entered their responses to the review questions on the platform, the assessment team should analyze the feedback, determine whether any clarifications are needed, and work to address the feedback as described below. If clarification is needed, the assessment team may contact individual reviewers to better understand the nature of their input and explore potential ways to resolve any identified issues.

[Insert screenshot of local reviewer feedback]

Feedback from local reviewers may be addressed (and resolved, if necessary) in similar ways as feedback from the LandScale first review. In some cases, local review feedback may not require a specific resolution but should still be considered and responded to within the documentation that the assessment team produces in response to the local review.

Local review feedback, along with any unresolved feedback from the first LandScale review, may be addressed in one of the following five ways. These options for addressing feedback mirror those used for addressing findings from the first LandScale review. However, Option 5 in this list is applicable only to local review feedback, not to findings from the LandScale review.

1. Provide more documentation: If feedback indicates the need for additional documentation, the assessment team should provide the necessary supporting documentation to address the specific deficiencies noted by the reviewers.

2. Revise the assessment: If feedback highlights a data quality deficiency, the assessment team may address it by taking one of the following actions:

   1. Select alternative or supplemental datasets and/or analysis methods that better align with the Step B guidelines, then generate revised metric results based on this revised approach.

   2. Proceed with primary data collection and use the suitable primary data to assess the metric.

   3. If neither of the previous approaches is feasible, the assessment team may decide to mark the metric (and the corresponding indicators as needed, consistent with guidelines) as 'data deficient'. In this case, the result and corresponding LandScale validation findings for that metric will not be displayed in the landscape profile or report.

3. Add a result limitation statement: If feedback points to a data quality limitation, the assessment team can resolve it by adding an appropriate limitation statement to the result. This statement should clearly address the identified limitations of the data or methodology used.

4. Refute the feedback: If the assessment team disagrees with any feedback suggesting the need for more documentation or raising concerns about potential data quality deficiencies or limitations, they may provide additional documentation to demonstrate that the results are of adequate quality, free from the identified limitations, and adequately documented. The assessment team may also engage in verbal or written exchanges with the local reviewer or LandScale team to better understand and resolve differing opinions on the suitability of the result and documentation. The assessment must provide written documentation of any such exchanges according to the guidelines stated here. The additional documentation should make specific reference the data limitations analysis criteria in Step B and directly address the feedback. For example, if the reviewer suggests a different dataset would have been better, the assessment team might document the strengths of the dataset they used relative to the one the reviewer recommended. This supplemental documentation should be shared with the reviewer(s) who raised the issue. If the documentation resolves the issue to the reviewer’s satisfaction, the feedback will be considered resolved. If it does not resolve the issue to the reviewer's satisfaction, the assessment team may either:

   1. Resolve the feedback through one of the first three options (providing more documentation, revising the assessment, or adding a result limitation statement).

   2. Submit the unresolved feedback as part of the second review during the Step C LandScale validation, where the LandScale team will make a final determination on whether the issue remains unresolved.

5. Justify why the feedback requires no action: If the assessment team believes that specific pieces of local review feedback do not require any resolution, they should clearly state and justify this view. For example, comments about the status and trends of landscape performance that do not pertain to the quality of the assessment and its results typically do not require action. An example could be: 'Household income in this landscape has been stagnant for 10 years despite strong national GDP growth. That shows a failure of our local government.' Similarly, comments that call for changes to the assessment scope, forms of information, or levels of detail that fall outside of the chosen assessment scope, landscape boundary, or LandScale assessment guidelines do not require action.

If results were changed as a result of this process (e.g., Options 2a, 2b, or 3, listed above), the new or revised results (and any corresponding documentation and limitation statements) must be re-submitted for Step C validation, which includes the two LandScale reviews and the local review. This will be followed by a further round of analyzing and addressing feedback as necessary until any outstanding feedback has been satisfactorily resolved through one of the above-mentioned means.