The Importance of Initial Seedling Characteristics in Controlling Allocation to Growth and Reserves under Different Soil Moisture Conditions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

General comments:

This is a really nice article and clearly a lot of work was conducted by the authors and research teams. It is a little challenging to follow the experimental designs and replicate numbers, I highly suggest a flow chart or some visual aid to document how pre-conditioning treatments were set up, which data were collected at each stage, etc. Alternatively, perhaps explain this study as multiple and independent experiments to help the reader follow. The classification of treatments such as HighNSC, Large, HighRSR are a little confusing and difficult to understand the criteria for each treatment. Perhaps a table summarizing each? It seems this research is very valid, but organization and explanation of clear treatment effects on specific response variables is lacking.

 

 

 

Line item comments

Line 44: what type of disturbances are you referring to? Just disturbances in general? Or construction and deforestation?

 

Line 69: Consider “precondition seedlings for certain environments” or similar, rather than “design”

 

Line 80: I am not sure I understand the meaning of this sentence (starting with For example,) and how it is relevant. Try rewording to clearly explain the effect.

 

Line 122: Change to “dolomitic limestone”

 

Line 123: This is technically a soilless substrate, since no soil was used in this media.

 

Line 153: What is RCD?

 

Line 183: Take out “a”

 

Line 189: Why use different statistical softwares/coding languages? R vs. SAS. Would be cleaner if all done in SAS or in R.

 

Line 275: The description of root collar diameter needs to be further up when you first discuss RCD.

 

 

Author Response

See attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript of "The importance of initial seedling characteristics in controlling allocation to growth and reserves under different soil moisture conditions" is written well and findings are also presented in befitting manner. However, I have certain query for the authors which are given below.

How, we can ignore contribution of genetic make up of the seedling by using seeds of aspen and jack pine from open-pollinated sources.

How uniformity of the seed size and weight of both  aspen and jack pine was determined prior to seedling raising.

Please include few plates (image) in support of the findings, including root zone where RSR level was higher.

Some of the physiological observation may have enriched the manuscript further but good thing is that author have applied deep statistics .

Author Response

See attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments on forests-2289237

From the abstract, I was attracted by the present study, the main interesting points of the present work to me are the different responses of the 3 groups of each species to drought in terms of growth, biomass allocation, and NSC storage, as well as the differences between the two species. However, after reading the MS, it is confusing to catch the main output and the novelty. The discussion should be more focused on the responses to drought and better separate into different sections, e.g., by species and groups within each species, then discuss the interspecies response difference. Also the introduction could be improved. Since you are exploring the drought resistant of differently primed seedlings within species, therefore the drought effects and the resistance characteristics should be emphasized, and why you choose these parameters, i.e., RSR, NSC storage.

I have the feeling that the treatment (the 3 different cultivation methods) is like a prime, the responses difference thereafter to drought are kind of memory or epigenetic effects. These terms should also be briefly addressed in the introduction.

In addition, there are several other concerns and minor corrections regarding the MS, please see below.

The reference is not in constant numeric order.

You mentioned After 16 weeks (all seedlings had terminated shoot expansion), but the phenological information of the seedlings before treatments is missing. When did you start the drought treatment and how was the developmental stages of both species? Were leaves fully opened before drought onset?

Fig. 2, 355-357, there is no different letters above different bars, so you can remove the text form the legend and just state “no significant differences among all treatment combination”.

Fig. 3, there are x and y on bars, shouldn’t also like a,b, c?

L108-112, listed 3 questions, this should be briefly addressed in the discussion, either supported or has to be rejected.

Line 84 and 87, 88, initial, subsequent, do, and many other cases through the text are in italic, I donot think it is necessary to use italic for emphasis

L102, which in turn may affect how new biomass is subsequently ? a word is missing at the end.

L147-151, why the seedlings were frozen for three months?

L153, full spell out of the abbreviation of RCD should be given by the first time

L201 Total to total

L320, normally we use α=0.05, but why you used 0.10?

 

Author Response

See attached file

Author Response File: Author Response.docx