Snow Exclusion Does Not Affect Soil Ammonia-Oxidizing Bacteria and Archaea Communities
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I have reviewed the manuscript entitled "Snow exclusion does not affect soil ammonia-oxidizing bacteria and archaea communities". The authors study the relationship between the change of snow cover and the soil ammonia-oxidizing microbial community. This topic is highly interesting for the readers of the readers if Forests as climate change demonstrates a dramatic effect on the global snow cover. The manuscript is generally well written.
My major concern some of the statistical analysis is problematic and the lack of details in the results section.
Figure 1: The ranking of the treatments seems incorrect. Did the authors perform post-hoc analysis? As for the AOA (early snow), AOB (deep snow), it seems that the ‘a’ group has lower mean values compared to ‘ab’ group. Please also include the raw data points in the figure.
Figure 3: the authors should show SE in the bar plot and use statical analysis to show the difference in community structure between treatments.
Figure 4: please use different colors for the polygon of different treatments.
L257-L260: the correlation between communities index and enzyme activities does not causation between them.
Author Response
Figure 1: The ranking of the treatments seems incorrect. Did the authors perform post-hoc analysis? As for the AOA (early snow), AOB (deep snow), it seems that the ‘a’ group has lower mean values compared to ‘ab’ group. Please also include the raw data points in the figure.
Reply: Thank you for your suggestion. We used one-way ANOVA with Tukey post hoc tests to test the effects of sampling period on AOA or AOB gene abundances, and the different lowercase letters indicate significant differences between sampling periods under the same snow treatments, differences between sampling periods under different snow treatments were not compared. The raw data has been added to the figure. Please see L197.
Figure 3: the authors should show SE in the bar plot and use statical analysis to show the difference in community structure between treatments.
Reply: Thank you. Since this is a general distribution plot, it is presented without statistical analysis. The data for the corresponding known phylum are shown in Figure 5 and statistically analyzed. Please see 254.
Figure 4: please use different colors for the polygon of different treatments.
Reply: According to the reviewer's instruction, we have revised the Figure 4. Please see L243.
L257-L260: the correlation between communities index and enzyme activities does not causation between them.
Reply: Agree with the reviewer’s comments. Our previous description is incorrect, and we have revised the description of the relevant content. Please see L273-278.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
The current study quantified the effects of snow exclusion on AOA and AOB. two years of snow treatment had no effect on AOA and AOB, while the sample time had significant effect on AOA and AOB. Despite the insignificant results, the current study is an important finding for winter ecology. Overall, the experimental design, organization of the MS, data analysis, figures, and writing of the current MS is good. I just have two minor comments to improve the MS:
The permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) can be used to explore the effects of treatment, sample times, and their interactions on communities of AOA and AOB. (refer to: Effects of long-term nitrogen addition on soil fungal communities in two temperate plantations with different mycorrhizal associations)
In figure 6, the effects of soil properties on AOA and AOB can be tested by distance-based redundancy analysis (db-RDA) or Mantel correlations.
Author Response
Point-by-point response letter
Reviewer #2
The permutational multivariate analysis of variance (PERMANOVA) can be used to explore the effects of treatment, sample times, and their interactions on communities of AOA and AOB. (refer to: Effects of long-term nitrogen addition on soil fungal communities in two temperate plantations with different mycorrhizal associations)
Reply: Thank you for your suggestion. The PERMANOVA has been used to explore the snow, sampling period, and their interactions on AOA and AOB communities. Please see Figure 4 and L234-236.
In figure 6, the effects of soil properties on AOA and AOB can be tested by distance-based redundancy analysis (db-RDA) or Mantel correlations.
Reply: Thank you for your suggestion. The results in Figure 6 were done by mantel testing, but our description is really unclear and has been re-described it. Please see L273-285.
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
