Reply to “Comment on ‘High-Definition Mapping of the Gutenberg–Richter b-Value and Its Relevance: A Case Study in Italy’ by M. Taroni, J. Zhuang, and W. Marzocchi” by Laura Gulia, Paolo Gasperini, and Stefan Wiemer

Taroni et al. (2021; hereafter TZM21) proposed a method to
perform a spatial b-value mapping based on the weighted-likelihood estimation and applied this method to the Italian region as a tutorial example. In the accompanying comment,
Gulia et al. (2021; hereafter GGW21) did not challenge the
TZM21’s method, but they argued that the catalog used by
TZM21 is contaminated by quarry blasts, introducing a bias
that may impact any seismotectonic or hazard interpretations.
Although in TZM21 the application to the Italian territory
was only a tutorial example and we purposely did not make
any thorough discussion on the meaning of the results in terms
of seismotectonic or seismic hazards (that would have required
many more analyses), we acknowledge the potential role of
the quarry blasts, and we add some further analysis here.
We thank GGW21 for giving us this opportunity. Here,
removing the part of the catalog contaminated by quarry blasts
and applying the same analysis as in TZM21, we obtain results
that are very similar to the ones reported in TZM21; specifically, only one region that is characterized by low natural seismicity rate shows a marked effect of the quarry blasts on the
b-value.