Gel-Forming Soil Conditioners of Combined Action: Field Trials in Agriculture and Urban Landscaping

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The Authors report on multivariate field trials of gel-forming soil conditioners for agriculture and urban landscaping in various climatic conditions from arid (O.A.E., Uzbekistan) to humid (Moscow region, Russia). The Authors discuss polymer superabsorbents with amphiphilic fillers and biocidal additives demonstrating both the success owing to their use, as well as the main problems of using hydrogels in soils (e.g. biodegradation, osmotiic collapse), and the corresponding technological solutions. The use of innovative materials, along with an intelligent soil design of capillary barriers for water accumulation, anti-pathogenic and anti-electrolyte protection of the rhizosphere, are also described, showing that gel-forming polymer conditioners and new technologies of their application increase by 30-50% the productivity of plant crops and the quality of biomass with a 1.3-2–fold saving of water resources and reliable protection of the topsoil from pathogens and secondary salinization. The paper, whose results can be useful to a wide range of specialists from chemical technologists to agronomists and landscapers, is acceptable, hencde it can be published as it stands.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer No. 1!
We sincerely thank You for reviewing this manuscript and its positive assessment with the approval of the publication in its current form. We also sincerely hope that the results of this study will be useful not only to practitioners in the field of agriculture and urban landsaping, but also help chemists to understand the problems of using such materials in practice and in the future to create even more effective soil conditioners.

With the best wishes from the author's team, Prof. Andrey Smagin

Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is well structured to deal with pedology science but only marginally involves polymer science. The polymer science aspects are centred on the use of a commercial acrylic polymer-based product as a water storage and active species release system.

Few information about the possible solutions for the problems related to the use and specific characteristic of the chosen polymer are given.

The Authors should give more emphasis to the polymer science aspects.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer No. 2!

We sincerely thank you for reviewing our manuscript and Your desire to improve it for publication in Polymers. We also understand Your general position on the suitability of this article to a greater extent for soil science, and to a lesser extent for polymer science. But we cannot agree with this. Being an invited Editor in a Special Issue of "Polymers for Soil in Agriculture and Urban Landscaping", I wanted to direct the attention of chemists to the main problems of using polymer composite gel-forming materials in practice. There are a huge number of interesting and promising developments in polymer chemistry that are potentially suitable for soil improvement, but most of them do not go beyond the walls of chemical laboratories. To bring these developments closer to reality, to identify not only a positive effect, but also numerous problems related to the behavior of polymer gel-forming composites in real chemically and biologically active soil environments, to develop a methodology for their technological testing in laboratory and field conditions - these are the main tasks of our planned Special Issue. And our first article on the methodology and results of laboratory technological quality tests for gel-forming soil conditioners has already been published (DOI:10.3390/polym14214665). You will find there more detailed characteristics of the polymer materials themselves (tested now in the field). And in the new article, You will agree, it does not make sense to repeat these characteristics. Its purpose is to present rather rare complex field tests of such soil conditioners. We believe that this is important and interesting not only for practitioners in the field of soil science and agriculture, but also for the chemical technologists themselves who read Polymers. From such articles, they can directly see not only the real effectiveness, but also the problems of using in practice the materials they create and, accordingly, direct their further efforts to solve these challenges.

This is our general position on the suitability of the manuscript for publishing in Polymers. According to Your individual comments, we cannot respond to You or make corrections, because by specifying "should be improved" in the Questionnaire, You did not specify in the text or illustrations what exactly "should be improved". For example, we consider the review of publications in the Introduction and Discussions to be very complete and sufficient to characterize the current state of field trials of composite polymer materials for soils. We didn't find any extra links in the list of References, they are all needed to describe methods or previous results. We do not understand what else needs to be added to improve the methodological part of the work, which is quite extensive. And finally, what conclusions are not confirmed from Your point of view by the results of this study. We do not refuse to Major Revision of the article, but this can only be done on specific proposals. Summarizing the response to Your review, we emphasize that we do not agree with Your opinion about the unsuitability of the article in its current form for publication in Polymers, especially since Reviewer No. 1 fully supported it. If our arguments are not convincing for You, we will ask the Editorial Board to appoint an alternative review. If You agree with our arguments and wish to help us improve this paper really, and not formally, we will gratefully wait for your specific comments and suggestions.

With deep gratitude and hope for mutual understanding, from the author's team

sincerely Yours, prof. Andrey Smagin

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The response of the Authors is only polemical without showing any effort to understand that an improvement of text could be possible if more strictly addressed to polymer science in terms of how these super sorbing materials can be designed for specific applications and not only how to be used (i.e. a reference to the diffusion e kinetics of swelling and degradation are not considered). My comments were only related to giving more emphasis to the scientific aspects that can improve the polymer science character of the journal. English text is still difficult to read.

Author Response

Deeply respected Reviewer #2!
We sincerely thank You for your positive assessment of the manuscript and advice on its improvement. We have made adjustments to the manuscript, according to Your comments. Since many questions about the relationship between the composition and technological parameters of composite gel-forming soil modifiers were discussed in our previous publication in Polymers, we gave a link to this publication. Also, following Your advice, we discussed in the Discussion section in more detail the technological problems of swelling kinetics and polymer biodegradation and their possible solutions for polymer chemistry, expanding the corresponding list of reverences. For convenience, we have highlighted all the changes in the text in blue in the new version of the manuscript.
With deep gratitude from the team of authors, prof. A.V. Smagin

Author Response File: Author Response.docx