The Distribution of Metallic Elements among Humus Substances in Soil from Volcanic Rocks
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The main idea of this study is clear but there are some questions and discussion need to be clarified as the following.
1. Please note that line 151 "and further analyses were repeated twice." What analysis do you mean? Does “Twice” have statistical significance? It is recommended to add at least three repetitions and do the chart and analysis again. Otherwise, the results of metal elements are not reliable in the full text.
2. The “results” and “discussion” section are confused, and there is no title “4 Discussion”. The discussion part needs to be greatly modified to achieve close connection between the results and references.
3. There are a lot of common detection methods in the abstract, such as lines 12 to 15, and it is recommended to delete. The article explains that there are 8 kinds of metal elements, and only 7 kinds of metal elements appear in the abstract, line 19.
4. In line 38, "PTEs (potentially toxic elements)" should be changed to "potentially toxic elements (PTEs)".
5. The logic of Introduction is very confused, and lines 27-76 did not mention "fulvic acids", but "fulvic acids" suddenly appeared in line 78, and its meaning was not clearly expressed in “introduction”.
6. The 8 elements selected in line 77-78 should be clearly explained why they are not other elements.
7. Why are the boundary lines of each part in Figure 1 different? For example, the red line has parts that exceed the green line, which is the roughness of the drawing or the original multiple areas.
8. Table 1. The location information in the first and last column is duplicate.
9. What does line 118 mean? Are there corresponding colors presented in this paper?
10. The “Identification” method in Table 2 is recommended to be described in the text or below the Table. What do “Ao, Bv, C, Ol, Aau, Bva, En and A/En” represent respectively?
11. How many samples are taken at each point from P1-P5?
12. What does “CHA” between lines 175 and 176 mean?
13. Figure 7. The results described in lines 371-372 cannot be seen.
14. Lines 376-385 should indicate which chart the data and analysis results correspond to.
15. Figure 8 and Figure 9 only show the results without discussing the reasons.
16. Language expression needs further improvement.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to thank you for carefully reading our manuscript (ID: sustainability-2045962) entitled “The Distribution of Metallic Elements Among Humus Substances in Soil from Volcanic Rocks”. We appreciate your comments and constructive recommendations, which have contributed to the improvement of our manuscript. In the attachment, we present separate answers to your comments. We also send the modified file via the online submission process.
Best Regards
Melania Feszterova (corresponding author)
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments to Authors:
This study investigates the distribution of metallic elements including (Al, Ca, Cu, Fe, K, Mg, Mn, and Zn) and their amount of humic and fulvic acids in three types of soil dependence on the quality and quantity of humus substances. However, the sections of the paper such as material and/or results i.e., are writing in confused. The English language should be revised, and some information should be completed and organized again.
- Title should be shorty
- Change “between” to “among”
- The abstract of this study is weak and should show important results. The objective and conclusion are not clear. The results are not enough. In general, this section is poorly written and arranged.
- Keywords should be written in English words. Also, it is inappropriate to mention the words that make up the manuscript's title here.
- Please focus on the one abbreviation “Humus of the soil” or “humus soil”
- line 27 change “the significant” to “a significant”
- line 29 add “and mitigation”
- line 33 change “are-materials” to “is-material”
- In line 48 you have mentioned the full name of Humus substances (HSs) so write the abbreviation
- please indicate the unfavourable soil properties in line 63 or 67.
- check the international standard units throughout manuscript.
- Check for complete information: Name of the instrument, Name of the company, city, and country.
- The authors should write materials and methods more organized and easily, in this form it's complicated and the reader is confused to complete and flow of the steps or procedures.
Results and discussion:
The whole results and discussion section is written rather repetitively, and readers are challenged to keep on reading! You need to rewrite this section so that it is attractive to the reader. When describing your results. Somehow you fail to really interpret your treatment effects. So please rewrite the results and discussion section again and try writing sample sentences.
Conclusion:
Rather general and repeating aspects from the Results & Discussion sections!
The conclusion should be highlighting the importance of the fractions of humus substances in soil and their role in the distribution of heavy metals. The organization of this section is poor. It should be improved by the authors.
Best regards
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to thank you for carefully reading our manuscript (ID: sustainability-2045962) entitled “The Distribution of Metallic Elements Among Humus Substances in Soil from Volcanic Rocks”. We appreciate your comments and constructive recommendations, which have contributed to the improvement of our manuscript. In the attachment, we present separate answers to your comments. We also send the modified file via the online submission process.
Best Regards
Melania Feszterova (corresponding author)
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The is a need for rewriting the both Abstract and Introduction; provision maps as well as update of a number of old references. This is very critical to maintaining the good presentation of the manuscript so far.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to thank you for carefully reading our manuscript (ID: sustainability-2045962) entitled “The Distribution of Metallic Elements Among Humus Substances in Soil from Volcanic Rocks”. We appreciate your comments and constructive recommendations, which have contributed to the improvement of our manuscript. In the attachment, we present separate answers to your comments. We also send the modified file via the online submission process.
Best Regards
Melania Feszterova (corresponding author)
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Your reply has been received, and your modification and reply are appropriate.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to thank you for carefully reading our manuscript (ID: sustainability-2045962) entitled “The Distribution of Metallic Elements Among Humus Substances in Soil from Volcanic Rocks”. We appreciate your comments and constructive recommendations, which have contributed to the improvement of our manuscript. Here, we present separate answers to your comments. We also send the modified file via the online submission process.
Best Regards
Melania Feszterova (corresponding author)
Reviewer’s comments:
English language and style are fine/minor spell check is required.
Answer 1: Thank you for your attention. We apologize for the mistakes. In the paper, we have corrected the mistakes.
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have given proper answers to the previous questions. However, I am still not satisfied with the abstract should be improved again also the conclusion section. Focus on the interesting results, and discuss them in the discussion section.
Unfortunately, the linguistic quality of the manuscript is not adequate for publication in Sustainability. I acknowledge that you worked on the paper to revise the English. However, this version of your manuscript is still not sufficient for publication. You must involve a native-speaking expert (e.g. from the US, UK, Australia, NZ) who is familiar with heavy metals studies to work on your manuscript on a sentence-by-sentence approach or you have to commission this task to a professional editing service (with a good expertise/reputation in editing scientific papers in the agricultural sector).
Best regards
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We would like to thank you for carefully reading our manuscript (ID: sustainability-2045962) entitled “The Distribution of Metallic Elements Among Humus Substances in Soil from Volcanic Rocks”. We appreciate your comments and constructive recommendations, which have contributed to the improvement of our manuscript. Here, we present different answers to your comments. We also send the modified file via the online submission process.
Best Regards
Melania Feszterova (corresponding author)
Reviewer’s comments:
The authors have given proper answers to the previous questions. However, I am still not satisfied with the abstract should be improved again, also the conclusion section. Focus on the interesting results and discuss them in the discussion section.
Unfortunately, the linguistic quality of the manuscript is not adequate for publication in Sustainability. I acknowledge that you worked on the paper to revise the English. However, this version of your manuscript is still not sufficient for publication. You must involve a native-speaking expert (e.g. from the US, UK, Australia, NZ) who is familiar with heavy metals studies to work on your manuscript on a sentence-by-sentence approach or you have to commission this task to a professional editing service(with a good expertise/reputation in editing scientific papers in the agricultural sector)
Response to Reviewer
- I am still not satisfied with the abstract should be improved again, also the conclusion section.
Answer 1: Thank you very much for the comment and your advice. Based on the above comment, we have modified the Abstract of this paper as follows:
The ability of humus substances to form stable complexes with inorganic and organic soil constituents plays a key vital role in the generation of environmental pollution, migration, and pollutants transformation. This paper deals with the study of the sorption of metallic elements (Al, Ca, Cu, Fe, K, Mn, Mg, Zn) in Andosols, Cambisols, and Planosols on Slovak soil types based on the detection of the quality and quantity of humus substances and soil textural properties. Five soil profiles from two areas in the central part of the Western Carpathians on volcanic rocks in Slovakia were investigated. HS values increased with Al, Ca, Cu, Fe, K, and Mg. Fe, Al, Ca, Mg, K, Mn, Cu and Zn increased with the FA fraction. Al, Ca, Fe, K, and Mg were increasing with increasing HA values. In the HA fraction, a very tight relationship was among K and Fe contents (r=0.902). In the FA fraction, we found with increasing Cu content, Ca content also increased (r=0.959). The HS values were positively correlated with the silt and negatively correlated with the clay and the sand fraction. Only the elements Mn and Zn in Planosol were below the detection limit. High concentrations of metallic elements were in Andosol.
Based on your advice, we have expanded the Conclusion of this paper as follows:
....... As the HS values increased, the metallic element contents (Al, Ca, Cu, Fe, K, Mg) also increased. In contrast to the increasing HS value, the value of Mn content decreased. The zinc content was found only in the FA fraction when bound to the fulvic acids. The distribution of metallic elements among fulvic and humic fractions was mainly on the FA fraction. All studied metals (Fe, Al, Ca, Mg, K, Mn, Cu, and Zn) were more abundant in the fulvic rather than in the humic fraction. In FA, all the values of the metallic element contents monitored were increasing except the value of Zn content. In humic fraction, the value of Cu content decreased with increasing HA values. The values of Mn and Zn were below the detection limit. In the case of HA values increased, the metallic element (Al, Ca, Fe, K, Mg) contents also increased................................
- The linguistic quality of the manuscript is not adequate.
Answer 2: Thank you for your attention. We apologize for the mistakes. In the paper, we have corrected the mistakes.
