Pelletized Straw Incorporation in Sandy Soil Increases Soil Aggregate Stability, Soil Carbon, and Nitrogen Stocks
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors try to rapidly improve the soil fertility through pelletized straw. The topic is OK but the practices and results are not convinced. The most obvious bug is the results of SOC content was the carbon content after 5mm sieving, which is not the soil organic carbon content but the organic carbon in straw and manure. I seriously doubts the results of this paper. It's horrible to improve soil TSN content by 1010%, 500%. Therefore, i suggest the authors to reconsider the results and conclusions.
Besides, there are also some suggestions to authors:
1. Avoid redundant description, such as the observations were introduced twice in abstract.
2. Some numberdescription should be given in results for abstract in order to support the description.
3. Research content rather than research indicators should be given in abstract.
4. Abbreviation should be introduced for the first time in main body.
5. There are no logical relationship for the description of soil aggregates and SOC/TSN in line 46-47. The reason why the author consider C/N in soil aggregates should be given.
6. There were no evidence that the straw can rapidly transformed to soil organic carbon.
7. There should be spaces between numbers and letters
8. The introduction for Eq. should be written flush without any blank.
9. What's the meaning for 1,2, 3 letters in figures?
10. Some figures need to be rearranged to avoid crowding.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
I am pleasure to have the opportunity to review the manuscript. This study focused on “Pelletized straw can help to increase soil aggregate stability and soil carbon and nitrogen stocks in poor sandy soil” It is an interesting study. And the experimental design is reasonable and the experimental data is rich.
There are some suggestions for authors to improve your manuscript.
(1) The amount of data is large, but the analysis is too simple. Just using analysis of variance for data analysis is a bit wasteful for scientific research to obtain data.Strengthen the integration and analysis of data, and the quality of the article will be significantly improved.
(2) The language of the article is generally redundant, and it is recommended to streamline it. At the same time, the language must be improved.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
In this manuscript, Zhang et al. evaluated the changes of soil chemical properties in sandy soils after pelletized straws were added. Overall, I think the concept of this manuscript is fine, but the manuscript is poorly written and need to be intensively revised for its English before it can be further reviewed.
In addition, the abbreviations used in this manuscript are confusing because they are different than what are commonly used in other related studies. Furthermore, some of the abbreviations are not even defined in the ms, making the ms even harder to read (i.e. Lines 203-206: TSNi?).
Secondly, the table and figure captions need to be thoroughly rewritten as most of them are hard to be understood.
Line 41: sequestrate?
Line 45: TSN? Do you mean TN?
Line 47: “promote”
Lines 48-52: the sentence is too long. Need to be fully revised.
Lines 162-: When were the soil samples taken?
Lines 174-175: The figure 1 can be moved to a supplementary file.
Line 291: “Through pot experiment (a) and field experiment (b, c) …” Should be revised to something like “Composition of water-stable aggregates in pot soil (a), 0-20 cm depth of field soil (b) and 20-40 cm depth of field soil (c)” for readability.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors got good results, but, in my opinion, the authors need to more clearly state the results of the research. There is a lot of unnecessary description of the data in the article, which makes it difficult to understand.
It is necessary to improve the English language and the style of writing the text. Also, there are typos in the text, and in general the text is written carelessly.
Some remarks I have indicated in the manuscript.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
All my questions have been answered and the article had improved a lot.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Reviewer 3 Report
In this revised manuscript, the authors analyzed the changes of soil physiochemical properties in the framlands added with or without pelletized straw. Basically, the English is largely improved for the readability. However, I suggest a rejection and resubmittion simply because the manuscript and the response to reviewer's comments are messed up.
The format in the submitted ms is unreadable. For example, the captions of Table 1 (Line 277-279) and the real table are seperated. In addtion, all the tracking marks are everywhere in the PDF file, making the reviewer hard to figure out which sentences are deleted or are kept in the revised manuscript.
In addtion, the responses to reviewers' comments are not finished. The responses to many questions are just halfly done. Many sentences or paragraphs are missing, which make the responses not able to be evaluated.
Based on the two above reasons, I don't think the MS can be published in the present form.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 4 Report
The authors have done a great job to improve the submitted article. In this version, much has become more clear, and the results are clearer. But there are still many typos and minor errors in the manuscript. English was improved, but not good enough. It is necessary to correct the arrangement of tables in the text and remove repeated figures.
The article can be accepted only after the elimination of all the comments that are indicated in the text.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
"Please see the attachment."
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 3
Reviewer 3 Report
The authors have addressed all of my questions clearly. Thus, I have no other questions to the revised manuscript.
