Attitudes, Perceptions, and On-Farm Self-Reported Practices of Shrimp Farmers’ towards Adoption of Good Aquaculture Practices (GAP) in Thailand
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thank you for an interesting study. The MS was clearly carefully made and only minor corrections are required (for more comments, see the attachment).
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the reviewer for the encouraging remarks and feedbacks for this manuscript.
The detailed responses are attached in the file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Consumers are increasingly concerned about the quality of their food products. In 2009, Good Aquaculture Practices (GAP) for marine shrimp farms were developed. In Thailand, there are still many shrimp farms that are not GAP certified. A study of the attitudes of shrimp farmers can help to understand why strategies to improve farms have not yet been adopted. This manuscript is about a study of the farmers’ perceptions and attitudes towards GAP in the case of shrimp farming.
This study is useful, the manuscript is well-written. This study could be published after some minor improvements.
Here are some remarks:
Title: It would be useful to specify in the title that the study was carried out in Thailand.
Page 2, lines 57-58, 61, 62, 64, 65: use italics to write species and genus of prawns: Penaeus monodon, Litopenaeus vannamei, Penaeus vannamei
Page3, line 111: what is DOF, 2018: if it is a reference, assign a number and add it in the references list.
Line 112: idem for the references “Yamane (1967)”
Page3, study design: “new- adopters,” “mid-adopters,” “old-adopters.” were defined according to the time since which GAPs were adopted. It would be useful to specify in which year the study was carried out. If it has lasted for a year or more, if the new adopters are different from the old ones (a new adopter in the first year of survey can become a mid-one if the survey continues several years after), etc. Some information about the dates is missing.
Page 6, line 272-273: write “Muddassir et al.” instead “Muddassir, Noor, Ahmed, Aldosari, Waqas, Zia, Mubushar and Jalip” idem lines 307, 309, page 8
Page 9, line 232: write “Flaten et al.” instead “Flaten, Lien, Ebbesvik, Koesling and Valle”
Page 9, lines 346-347: write “Spadoni et al instead “Spadoni, Lombardi, Canavari and Hingley”
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the reviewer for the encouraging remarks and feedbacks for this manuscript.
The detailed responses are attached in the file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The study deals with a timely and important issue and the paper is generally well written. I feel the combination of Results and Discussion works fine here – I would modify to ‘3. Results and Discussion’. Thailand could be mentioned in the title to better inform the reader. I would appreciate more clarity on how the options were scored (line 133) one to five with one being low I presume? Was any narrative description of the categories given to guide respondents, very low, low, average etc? Do these scores correspond to the perception levels at (line 138) and please clarify why this transformation was required? Please describe the basis for categorising the level of agreement at lines 146-148, is this in line with other assessments perhaps?
Some specific points
Replace ‘excerpts’ at line 123 with ‘experts’
Replace ‘reports’ at line 128 with ‘studies’
Replace ‘conducted’ at line 129 with ‘used’
Replace ‘water pond maintenance’ at line 279 with ‘Repairing pond’ for consistency with Table 2 (or vice versa) and check elsewhere
Author Response
The authors would like to thank the reviewer for the encouraging remarks and feedbacks for this manuscript.
The detailed responses are attached to the file.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
