Hybrid Platform for Assessing Air Pollutants Released from Animal Husbandry Activities for Sustainable Livestock Agriculture

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The first thing that bumps into eyes is an abstract which needs to be totally rewritten: there is no referral to the methodology, and it is not professional to say that that the study is exhaustive (this is an issue to be clarified by reviewers and all the reading public), just "limit" to describe what you did. 

In the text it is not very clear what type of analysis you conducted, so please make a better presentation of the methodology. 

Conclusions are poor, you shall comment possible limitation and possible future research. Moreover, consider to follow up implication, from practical but especially from academic point of view. 

Make a deep copy editing and proofreading. 

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The present work (sustainability-1311208) is focused on investigating the emission intensity of cattle farming and their mitigation by optimizing the production process. In order to collect and monitor data such as ambient conditions, emissions, animal motion, and feed, several smart devices were installed at the farm.

Major comments:

After reading the manuscript, I would suggest that you first revise your abstract and your conclusions. I was not able to find in the main text your results on optimizing the production process and how this decreased the emissions. Please correct me if I am wrong! The study is more about collecting and monitoring some important parameters. Furthermore, in the conclusion section, you mention the results of ammonia emissions and nothing about carbon monoxide and particle pollution that you recorded. Then, you mention the greenhouse gas emissions, where are the results for carbon dioxide or methane?   

Specific comments:

Please avoid or define abbreviations when you are using them for the first time, e.g., (line 20) GHG in the abstract section or (line 193) EMEP in the main text. Please check the whole manuscript again.

Please include the main conclusions of your work in the abstract.

Please use subscripts: instead of CH4, NH3 should be CH₄, NH₃, etc.

Some statements should be supported with references and some sentences should be revised since they are too long. For example: (lines 33-36) Can you give a reference? (lines 45-49) or (lines 404-408) Sentences are too long. Please check the whole manuscript and improve it.

Please include at the end of the introduction section your objectives.

Please mention tables in the main text. You have tables, but you do not refer to them in the main text.

Can you please enlarge Figures 1, 5, 6, and 7 for better visibility and clarity?

You mention Tier 1 and Tier 2 in the study. Please explain what they mean.

These references do not follow the instructions of the journal: (line 155) IPCC 2006 and (line 157) Esri 2017. Please check the whole manuscript for such errors.

Please give the exact location of the farm (line 296).

Please be consistent, e.g., l/head/day (line 298) and kg/head/day (Table 4). Please check the whole manuscript for such errors and correct them.

Another example: Figures 2 and 3 are not mentioned in the main text.

Please include a list of symbols and abbreviations.

Thanks.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

As a publication on a platform that may support sustainable solutions, the tone set up from the first paragraph has a negative overview of the animal agriculture and food production. I suggest neutrality of the background information.

Lines 35 – 36: Provide citations supporting these statements of animal exploitation and plant resources unable to follow the trend

Lines 104 – 106: Provide citation to support the claim

Multiple acronyms that are not introduced when they were first mentioned (Example: AFOUL)

Re-do the Table 1 to present the details of the methods concisely. Flip the columns and rows and compare the three methods under the following topic or similar.

• Source
• Platform
• Particles and gases
• Particle size
• Attributes modeled
• Model performance
• Tested using empirical data and evidence
• Advantage
• Disadvantage

 

Table 2. Compare the different digital platforms in a meaningful, concise, and easier to follow manner. Best would be to compare the introduced hybrid system with the existing AP to highlight the value added here.

 

Clarify the function and traffic through the Knowledge mediator with further details

 

Lines 453 – 454: The ranges may change with seasonality and geographical region and hence expectation of the future range based on one case study is insufficient. Compare the ranges to any relevant published literature for the expected range

 

As it is explained currently, the hybrid system is useful as an indicator of critical parameters of the stable environment, animals, and feed that can be monitored via IoT devices installed in farms. Which is not different from aggregating the readings from the different devices into one platform. The case study does not demonstrate the use of the ‘cloud layer’ and the generating information component. Include an example of a model that can be used and the type of information that can be generated to be used in decision making by the end-user

 

Discuss the userfriendliness, maintenance, and sustainability of the platform as a practical tool

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I appreciate that the author(s) accepted the revisions proposed. 

Author Response

Thank you for the kind appreciation

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for your revision (sustainability-1311208-peer-review-v2).

Minor comments that should be further addressed:

As requested in my previous review, please give references to the following sentences: “The population explosion and the change in human eating behavior are increasing the demand for animal products.” (line 33-34) and “This situation leads to a significant increase in emissions from animal farming.” (line 34-35).

Please be consistent: in the abstract, you mention “PM1, PM2.5, PM10” without subscripts while in the main text with, see, e.g., “PM₁₀” (line 112) and “PM_2.5” (line 113), etc.

(lines 107-114) You do not say anything about PM1 (particulate matter with a diameter of 1.0 μm or less). Please clarify and add 1-2 sentences about it.

Further, you present results in your study about CO emissions. However, the introduction says nothing about these emissions. Why CO emissions are harmful and how do they affect the environment and human health?! Please add a few sentences.

(line 821) Instead of “The below tables” use “Table 5” or “ Table 6”, or “Tables 5 and 6”.

(Table 6) Please, could you complete Table 6 with the results for PM1?! If you measured PM1, please include the results!

Still difficult to read Figures 5, 6, and 7. Could you please enlarge and place them in parallel, not as a series of graphs?! Thank you.

Please, as mentioned in my previous review, improve your conclusion section! You mention your findings on ammonia emissions and nothing about carbon monoxide and particle pollution that you measured.

Typos:

(line 24) “)” or see (line 704) “.” which should be eliminated. Although, all these errors will be corrected during editing, could you please check your manuscript and correct them where necessary. There are others as well. Thank you.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have sufficiently responded to the suggestions and provided the citations as needed. Here are few further edits to make.

Table 1 and 2: The advantages and disadvantage section need subsections as the comparisons are on entirely different aspects

Lines 443 – 444: Mention the citation for estimated AP concentrations  

Lines 702 – 707 revise the sentences. Tier 1 has was introduced after Tier 2, is there a reason why to do in this order? Suggesting removing the brackets and using few sentences to describe the details instead.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf