Plant Growth, Yields and Fruit Quality of Processing Tomato (Solanum lycopersicon L.) as Affected by the Combination of Biodegradable Mulching and Digestate

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

improve in lines:

90 unit record s/cm,

219, 246, 256 unit record g/ml

242 unit record g/l

412 make a superscript in the unit notation

figure 1
there are two pictures, so please make two captions

figure 2
there are two pictures, so please make two captions

in Table 4, the unit "g" should be in the last column

standardize the caption of tables and figures.
decide whether there will be an abbreviation tab./fig. or table / figure.

Chapter 5 conclusions:

please expand the conclusions, a bit too short for such extensive research.

Author Response

Suggestions of Reviewer 1

Line 90 (line 94  in the revised Word file of the paper): I modify the unit record in mS/cm and I added the soil: water ratio (1:5) of the examined soil samples

Lines 219-220-223-245-246-250-260-275-276 (line 243-260-270-271-274-285-301  in the revised Word file of the paper): we noted that besides the lines pointed out by the reviewer, many other units of measure were changed, probably in the conversion from Word to PDF files. So, we have restored the original units that were ml or mg or mM

Figures 1 as well as Fig 2 were composted by two pictures. In agree to the reviewer’s suggestion, we separated the two pictures of each figure in two different figures with related captions. As a consequence, progressive number of all the figures in the text was updated

Line 412 (line 441  in the revised Word file of the paper): I made the superscript as mg kg^-1 f.w.

In Table 4 I put the unit (g) under the right column ‘Fruit mean weight’

I standardized captions of all Figures and Tables by abolishing all the abbreviations

Conclusions were expanded as requested from both the reviewers.

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Overall a valuable paper, but check especially the data in Figure 1 and Table 3. These do not fit together considering the number of plants and the dry matter content. Further comments are inserted in the pdf.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Suggestion of Reviewer 2

(number of lines are referred to the pdf copy modified by the reviewer)

Line 28 (line 29 in the revised Word text): I agree with reviewer with regard the not separable effects of cultivar and year. As a consequence, I modified sentence as suggested

Line 97 (line 101 in the revised Word text): I completely agree with reviewer and I very appreciate its comprehension of the practical constraints we have to face in setting the experimental design in a commercial farm

Lines 104-114 (line 108 in the revised Word text): In agree to the reviewer’s suggestion, we abolished the lines substituting them with Table 1. Accordingly to this change all the numbers of the other tables in the text and in the caption were updated.

Lines 278-279 (lines 307-308 in the revised Word text):  Only a probability level 0.05  was considered in agree to the suggestion of the reviewer because we cannot recalculate ANOVA with SAS or R. All tables and Figures reporting statistical test refer to a probability level 0.05.

Figure 1b (in the revised version it will be fig. 2): We have not understood the sentence of reviewer. There can be no match between dry matter of fruit per plant at week 12 and the yield (week 16) expressed as fresh matter in Tab 3 (now 4)!

Table 4 (tab 5 in the revised version): We modified caption according to the right observation of reviewer

Line 409 (line 528 in the revised Word text): changed lycopene to polyphenols

Line 411 (line 531 in the revised Word text): the sentence was modified by clarifying when differences among the means were significant

Lines 515-517: we have eliminated the whole sentence

In addition to the changes executed on the basis of the reviewer’s suggestions, some other minor corrections were made in the text. They are also highlighted with Track changes function.

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx