Utilization of Spider Plants (Gynandropsis gynandra, L. Briq) amongst Farming Households and Consumers of Northern Namibia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Utilization of Spider plant (Gynandropsis gynandra, L. Briq) amongst farming households and consumers of northern Namibia

Barthlomew Chataika, Levi Shadeya-Mudogo Akundabweni, Enoch G. Achigan-Dako, Julia Sibiya and Kingdom Kwapata

REVIEW

It is a relevant study on utilization of a neglected and underutilized vegetable, spider plant. A large amount of data has been collected, analysed, and presented in the paper. However, there are some points which need to be considered to improve the manuscript. First, the title of the work implies two separate categories of people who deal with the plant, but in fact the farming households are consumers too. To better reflect the contents, I suggest replacing consumers with "market customers" or something like that. Second, I wonder, what are the major reasons that the vegetable is still underutilized despite of its many useful traits? Is it a lack of some specific knowledge, problems with its domestication, low demand by growers as the vegetable grows semi-wild, or what else? A brief discussion on these issues would improve the paper. Also, it would be interesting to see if there is any correlation between people education and utilization of the plant. The other points to be considered are listed below.

Lines 44-47: Provide some baseline botanical information about the species (family, life cycle, reproduction modes, etc.).

Lines 68-70: "… ethnobotanical study for evaluating, … and prioritizing the interventions have the potential for reducing production constraints, …" – what do you mean under "interventions"?

Line 88: Remove comma after subheading.

Lines 98 and 101: Is "Okavango West" and "Kavango West" the same?

Line 123: Explain all elements in the formula 1; what does it stand for q?

Line 128: Replace "this as based" with "this is based".

Line 138: Replace "homesteads’" with "homesteads.".

Line 152: Replace "conducted by" with "conducted".

Line 171 and elsewhere: Replace "Shannon-Weiner" with "Shannon-Wiener".

Line 182: I suggest replacing "imputed" with "estimated".

Line 192: Replace "formulae" with "formula" (singular).

Line 196: Use one grammatical tense consistently – present or past – "means" or "meant".

Lines 230-231: Include consumers group in the caption of Table 4 to fully reflect its contents.

Table 4: Consider more consistent age intervals: I suggest writing "Adults (≥ 60 yrs)" instead of "Adults over 60" and "Children (≤ 5 yrs)" instead of "Under-five". Otherwise you omit those who are 60 and 5 years old. In row 8 replace "SP" with "spider plant" to be consistent with the last row of the table. Row 3 (Adults over 60), column 6 (Max): how should reader interpret the number 3.3? For Min and Max numbers I suggest not using decimals, just be consistent with the part b of the table. Add rows for "Age of respondent" for each user group as in Appendix A. The latter then should be removed as redundant.

Table 5: Correct the percentage in column 5, line 3 (31.3.4 ?).

Table 8: Add table rows as subtotals by Respondents category and fill them in.

Lines 299-300: Explain briefly how the overall rankings were calculated that in most cases they differ significantly from the averages of farming households and consumers RIRs (Table 9).

Lines 302-304: Remove this last sentence of the paragraph as it duplicates the first sentence of the next paragraph (and includes incorrect figure references).

Table 9: This table largely duplicates Table 8 except for the column Overall RIR. So, please consider merging these two tables. Provide a footnote for letter meaning in Overall RIR column. What does the mean of overall RIR (3.54) tell us? Could you provide any comparison with other vegetables or other countries/regions where spider plant is utilized?

Lines 310-311: "Figure 3A shows a strong correlation (r=0.87) on the ranking of the utilization traits of Spider plant between male and female respondents". So, what exactly shows Figure 3B (r=0.67) bearing in mind that correlation is a relationship between two factors or variables?

Appendix A: This is part of Table 4. So, remove it and append Table 4 with "Age of respondent" for each user group as mentioned above.

Reference list

Reference 16: Replace "Benini" with "Benin".

Reference 25: Replace "Psiocologica" with "Psicologica".

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The response to the reviewer's comments has been uploaded

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

 

Throughout the document spider plants are named as "Spider plant is..." This is incorrect and should either be "The spider plant is..." or "Spider plants are..." Also, it is capitalized throughout and shouldn't be unless beginning a sentence. There are also many misspellings, random words are capitalized, and other issues, including the tables which nearly all have an error in them. I have included specific errors and grammar issues within the attached document.

Line 68-70 is not understandable.

Line 85-86 has a hypothesis, but it doesn't state why this would be the hypothesis, nothing in the introduction has demonstrated that there would be no differences based on groups or regions.

For the data analyses, it is not mentioned why those statistics are used or proper for this data. At the same time, it seems overly descriptive and the formulas specifically can just be cited.  

For the results 3.1., I think it is better suited for an appendix or at least shortened significantly, especially since much of the results are just stating the numbers from the tables. Either shorten and state the numbers and remove the tables, or add as appendix.

Figure 1 and 2 should just be Figure 1a and b. Also, Figure 1 doesn't show the plant and should be replaced with something more relevant.

I also don't fully understand the difference between table 5 and 6. Perhaps only one should be used and better explained. I also don't understand why each row in table 5 is only 100%. So each group could only choose one of the uses? I would assume and as stated throughout each group has various uses. If this is true, it shouldn't equal to 100%.

I also see there are many tables, which are not all necessary and can be placed in an appendix. 

For Figure 3, it should be in colors, since the patterns are difficult to distinguish. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please find uploaded response document

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper aims to identify the uses of spider plant and determine the level of consensus and rank utilization traits amongst the farming households and consumers in the five regions of northern Namibia.

The authors use different tools to investigate stakeholder knowledge about spider plant like semi-structured questionnaires, focus group and interviews.

The statistical analyse was performed and Fidelity level, Shannon indexes Rapid informant rank and Pearson correlations were computed. 

The main results highlight that spider plant is mainly used as food plants, social uses, income generation and, with less importance, as medicines and pesticides.

The authors identified a different stakeholders perception and knowledge according to their sociolinguistic groups and geographic areas.

The authors finally suggest to implement domestication programme of the species in order to increase food security of the rural areas. 

My main comments concern the potential impact of the domestication and cultivation programme on the rural areas. Which strategy should be envisaged to implement such programme? On the other hand, the authors should specify what would be necessary to implement a domestication programme of spider plant. How farmers should manage the cultivation of spider plant at farm level? How the cultivation should impact the land use systems of the areas/regions?

Moreover, the authors should try to explain better why there are differences among stakeholders concerning the use and utilization of spider plant: for example, why women perceive more the beneficial value of the plant as pesticide than man or why female respondents consider the sociocultural value of Spider plant as more important than organoleptic quality, etc.

The paper needs minor but several text editing:

• Line 46: there is a repetition “of the”
• Line 88: remove the comma
• Line 92: check °E
• Line 134, Table 1: check text formatting
• Line 136: “ministry” uppercase
• Line 138: remove the apostrophe on homesteads and enter a point before Study
• Line 152: remove “by” before open market
• Line 157: at the end of point 1 put semicolon
• Line 169: check punctuation at the end of sentences
• Line 171 as in the rest of the document: the explanation of the acronyms must be capitalized
• Line 172: remove (H)
• Line 191: in the text it is not necessary to explain the acronym every time; check the whole document
• Line 208: total is equal to 99%
• Line 211: insert the space between 8.7 and year
• Line 212: missing a point after table 3
• Line 238: “Northern” lowercase
• Line 241: check the correspondence of the value 22.6 with the table 5
• Line 275: Ndonga (N=19)
• Line 291: missing the space after 2005
• Line 296: table 8 check the formatting
• Line 413: spider – uppercase
• Line 427 and 433: there is a repetition

Author Response

Please refer to the uploaded document

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper has improved. It is better organized, clearer, and much easier to follow. The only issues that should still be improved are:

The introduction is just two paragraphs. The second paragraph is very long and difficult to follow. It should be broken up into two or three paragraphs.

Line 246-47 is hard to distinguish the values. Perhaps better to write 17, 49.4, 54.3, 44.5, 45.4 thousand households.

Figure 1 is much better and improved.

I still think Table 5 and 6 is too confusing since they are so similar. I would keep Table 6 and move 5 to supplementary.

Line 478. The table has no number. Also, it seems unnecessary and can easily just be written in the results.

Figure 2 look good but the colors also are a bit distracting. Perhaps it can be changed into more simple palette.

Line 608 and 609 should be the same paragraph.

Author Response

Please find the attached response to the comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx