Carbon Balance under Organic Amendments in the Wheat-Maize Cropping Systems of Sloppy Upland Soil

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Minor revision

The topic is interesting and well presented, however, it is necessary to check grammatical and stylistic errors throughout the text.

It was investigated the effect of different treatments on photosynthetic parameters, but there is no information about in in the abstract. In my opinion, the results also should mention in the abstract.

After making corrections the paper may be considered for publication.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We (authors) thank the anonymous reviewers for their efforts in giving really critical and constructive comments that we strongly believe have improved the quality of the manuscript. We have addressed the comments and step-by-step mentioning the lines in the text where changes have been made.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The work is very well structured and documented. The results show the practical importance for farmers and the environment. I have only one comment:

- the authors should mention the significance of the lower cases letters in the figures.

Author Response

We (authors) thank the anonymous reviewers for their efforts in giving really critical and constructive comments that we strongly believe have improved the quality of the manuscript. We have addressed the comments and step-by-step mentioning the lines in the text where changes have been made.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article is not well written, English language and style need to be thoroughly improved, and also the punctuation is somewhat wrong. Thus, some parts of the manuscript are not clear.

My principal criticism is that one single year of experiment is not enough to correctly evaluate the considered effects and relationships; to be really significant, at least three years of experiment are necessary. As it is, the manuscript has no scientific robustness, since the considered year could have been anomalous for any reason and not representative. Thus, all the discussion and conclusions are not sound and not justified by the results. Moreover, they are contradictory in some parts.

Other specific comments:

• The introduction contains repeated concepts, please reformulate.
• Please make explicit all the acronyms at their first appearance in the text.
• Please rewrite formulas without starting new lines, otherwise they are hardly understandable.
• In figure 1, 2 and 5 the graphs are hardly readable. And why the maize season is not represented in all the graphs?
• In the caption of table 1 “mean” is repeated, and into the table I cannot understand the difference among the three growth stages.
• Line 434: Pearson, not Person.
• Line 436: “observed between” is repeated.
• Line 510: I think you mean “North China Plain”.

Author Response

We (authors) thank the anonymous reviewers for their efforts in giving really critical and constructive comments that we strongly believe have improved the quality of the manuscript. We have addressed the comments and step-by-step mentioning the lines in the text where changes have been made.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

English language and style are now improved, but you did not address my comment about the inadequacy of a single year of experiment for the evaluation you intend to perform. Thus, the scientific robustness of the work was not improved. I can suggest you to explain better which kind of long-term experiment was conducted in the study area, and why you believe that one year can provide enough reliable information for your conclusions. Were the monthly precipitation and air temperatures during the considered year near to the long-term averages? Are you sure that year was representative, and why? Even if this is demonstrated, all the discussion and conclusions need to be reformulated, because these results should be at least presented as preliminary. As they are, discussion and conclusions are not sound.

Moreover, there is still an acronym not defined at its first appearance in the text (WFPS), defined instead in the Results section in two different contradictory ways; equations are still written in three lines, except (4); in table 2 the difference among the three growth stages is still not clear – I can see only one value for each parameter and each treatment.

There is no need to repeat in the text all the results already reported in the tables, you should just discuss them.

Author Response

We thank the anonymous reviewers 3 for his efforts in giving really critical and constructive comments that we strongly believe have improved the quality of the manuscript. We have addressed the comments step-by-step mentioning the lines in the text where changes have been made. The current version of our manuscript considered two years of experiments than a single year, and we revised a whole paper accordingly.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf