Monitoring Root and Shoot Characteristics for the Sustainable Growth of Barley Using an IoT-Enabled Hydroponic System and AquaCrop Simulator

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript “Smart Agronomical Evaluation for Sustainable Growth of Barley using IoT enabled Hydroponic System and AquaCrop simulator” is aimed to use G-Iot in agriculture. You wrote too much information to understand this manuscript. It makes difficult to catch the implication of this study. Please write more clearly and briefly. Below are some points that would require attention.

 

Introduction:

Please focus on the explanation to understand the results in this article. Now, too much information to understand. Where is the need statement? What is the objective of this study?

Figure 2: This article is not review article, so I think Figure 2 is not needed in this paper.

 

Result and Discussion:

L432-455: This is Material and Method.

Figure 18: You should combine trial 1 and 2, and conduct statistical analysis between soil and hydroponics. If you do not conduct statistical analysis, you cannot answer RQ.1.

L461-L472: You can write more clearly.

Figure 19, Figure 20, and Figure 21: You can combine one figure. Again, if you want to compare hydroponics and substrate medium, you have to conduct statistical analysis. Put the scale bar on the picture.

Figure 22 and 23: You can combine one figure. Same suggestion above. The subtitle of Figure 23 might be wrong.

Figure 25 and 26: I cannot understand how we can compare these two screen shots.

I think this paper is not related these three questions below.

RQ. 2: Which hydroponic setup is the best suited for barley cultivation?  

RQ. 3: How can energy conservation be ensured in an IoT enabled hydroponic setup?

RQ. 4: How can water conservation be further enhanced in hydroponic setup?

 

Author contributions: Please write

Reference: Please cite the references correctly.

Author Response

Thanks alot for worthy comments, the stated changes have been made

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

 

Please see my review of the manuscript titled ‘Smart Agronomical Evaluation for Sustainable Growth of Barely using IoT enabled Hydroponic system and AquaCrop Simulator’ .

 

This article needs serious work. The entire article's conceptualization is not appropriate and is misguided. This article is a strange fusion of three pieces: review-like studies on 1) IoT and 2) research methodology and agricultural-themed research. I advise the authors to separate these and focus on one, or if you wish to combine IoT and barley experiment, try to find a better synthesis. The research questions raised in lines 101-106 reflect this problem. The greatest problem is RQ5. The novelty must be clear for the authors from the beginning of the article. For readers, it should be clarified but not in an explicit way.

Title and the manuscript: There is a light relevance of this title to this manuscript. It does not describe/title the content.

The abstract is not suitable in this form, the last 5 rows are useful only.

The introduction is too long and non-sense to this topic. It starts from a very distant topic which has low relevance.

Motivation and Background Study is nonsense and not needed at all. To present these, please write an else article. It is almost 7 pages long.

The methodology part contains introduction elements like a wider description of barely. It is only 5 pages full of big-sized figures. It has very wrong proportions. The work which was carried out and the IoT setting are not described well. No deep analysis was presented here.

Results: not comprehensive, figures and table are of poor quality, and their explanation is also poor. The results shown in Table 4 are not validated and it is not clear to me how reliable this is.

Conclusion: it does not contain scientific evaluation or secondary literature.

References: in the Reference list there are 60 pieces but in the text, only 53 are mentioned, from 54 to 60 there is no reference mentioned in the text.

There is no secondary literature.

In general, it can be stated that there is no consistency between the two adjacent parts of this manuscript.

Figures and tables: 

- Figure 1 and 2: too big, too big font size, font type is not Palatino Linotype which is the font type of the text of the article, and more importantly, they are not explained at all in the text. Readers will not learn what green production, green design, green disposal, and green utilization are, especially, in regard to green IoT. In addition, Figure 2 is very powerpoint presentation-like.

- Figure 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11 are not supposed to be in this scientific article under this topic. In addition, their quality is very poor in terms of font size (sometimes too big (Figure 8-11), sometimes impossible to read (Figure 8), and ratio of the sides. 

- Figure 12 and 13 are like a copied and then paste from a brochure, hence absolutely not acceptable in a scientific article in this form. Please, if you got this from another source, modify it and reference it, but do not use it.

- Figure 13 can be the main figure of the study, please, improve it, it is too powerpoint like, and set Palatino Linotype.

- Fig. 15 and 16 are not of good quality.

- Tables 1 and 2 are not edited well, very messy.

- Fig 18., 21, 22, and 23 must be uniform, this form is messy,

- Fig. 25 and 26 are not suitable to be presented in an article, but rather in a thesis, a book or a presentation.

 

Best regards,

   Reviewer

Author Response

Thanks alot of detailed and excellent review, we have updated the draft, please find attached reponse

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Please see the attached files.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks alot for your response, we have addressed all the valid and valued comments, please find detailed responses in evidence

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please, see the pdf document which contains all my comments and figures, tables.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thankalot for your comments, we have modified the contents based on your valuable and to the points comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript are now enough to publication.

Author Response

Thanks alot for your comments, We have addressed the comments carefully and would like to appreciate your comments. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The manuscript has undergone significant improvements. Most of the suggestions were accepted and your work with them is noticeable. Yet, there are some minor mistakes which must be corrected.

The numbering of the Chapters is incorrect: Materials and methods are not chapter 3 but 2. And from here, all the numbers must be corrected including the sublevels'.

Since you had to modify your manuscript a lot and hence you added a new structure to it and also add new paragraphs but kept many parts, please, try to create better coherence between the first parts and the ending parts of the article. E.g. you reducer RQs to 3, yet in the results (LINE 397) RQ5 is mentioned. Please correct it, and be very conscious of such situations.

The editing help from a technical aspect is still needed, too, since some of the figures are still not well-formed e.g. Fig. 2 or the resolution (DPI) is not sufficient e.g. Fig. 6b or Fig. 13. This is may due to several uploading and downloading of the document.

There are some spelling-text editing errors. Please, review the text once again in great detail, character by character and remove errors, and replace spaces and punctuation where necessary, e.g. LINE 199, 222.

Instead of 'Barley' you may use 'barley' in Materials and Methods, as well as you used it in Introduction.

I still miss a longer Conclusion with secondary literature. In its one-paragraph length, it is still too general and does not provide an adequate connection to other research. 

Regards,

  Reviewer

Author Response

Thanks alot for your comments, We have addressed all the comments

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf