Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Soybean Cultivation Fertilized with Biochar from Various Utility Plants

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript entitled- “Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Soybean Cultivation Fertilized with Biochar from Various Utility Plants” has been critically reviewed and found to be interesting. The study is important in the present era of climate change and I recommend it for further consideration. I have some of the suggestions for authors which will help in improving the manuscript.    

 

Authors are suggested to improve organization of sections.

If possible, add subheading in material and method, similar in result and discussion    

Cross check for super and subscripts: Line no 44, 48, 99, 134, 383, 389,390,395,403, etc.

Line no 90-91: Add the supporting reference to your sentence.  

Line no 92: meaning not clear of the sentence- Reference objects were objects in which only natural fertlizers were applied????.  

Line no 94-96: long sentence, it reduces the readability. Kindly split it.

Line no 114: along with references 20-21, it is suggested to add https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2021.111379  study.

Figure 4 and 5: axis missing??

Figure 1: Improve the quality of image and remove duplicate figures.

Improve quality of manuscript, and avoid sub and superscripts errors, etc.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank for comments and suggestions,which help us a lot to enhance the manuscript quality.

We provided the all chnages in manuscript, which is attached.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript dealt with a research topic that is interesting for the Agronomy, MDPI journal readers. The authors used the classical approaches to assess the greenhouse gas emissions in soybean cultivation fertilized with biochar. It is original research, where is easy to identify efforts to research methods application and data collection. The title “Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Soybean Cultivation Fertilized with Biochar from Various Utility Plants” looks adequate, attractive, challenging, and updated. However, the authors need to address some concerns before it gets the acceptance status.

 

Here below I listed several major and minor concerns that need to be addressed.

 

Major concerns:

1) The materials and methods section must include some description of the site's environmental conditions and soil characteristics in order to show the complete experimental picture. In the experiment design, as the authors chose a Completely Randomized Blocks design, the confusion must be addressed.

 

2) The methods must be organized because there are many repeated ideas throughout the text. Please, provide more sequential ideas in order to disentangle the processes applied.

 

3) The authors are not clear why they show some statistical outcomes in the methods section. Tables 6 and 7, figures 1 and 2, must be moved to the results section. The ANOVA is not needed, just let us know the treatment means and their corresponding standard errors and mean separation letters.

 

4) I strongly suggest eliminating the duplicated figure 1.

 

5) The results and discussion section is very weak in terms of explanation of results and the contrast among them. A deeply detailed explanation must be made to address the output of the experimental design. Likewise, the authors must show the more important findings supported by statistical analysis and p values. In this case, the authors have to interpret the interactions (biochar type x doses) first and then make a comprehensive discussion based on the main effects of each of the independent variables (also termed as "factors"). Again, organize the methods to address correctly the results.

 

7) What is the limitation of the present study? Please, provide one paragraph at the end of the discussion regarding the limitation of this study. How is the impact of the tested biochar and doses on the production costs? Is there any limitation of those biochar types?

 

8) In addition, I strongly suggest the authors organized the ideas in the manuscript according to each section as there is crossed information throughout the text which will need to be corrected before it is considered for publication.

 

Minor concerns:

 

Line 187: In table 1, change the name “experimental objects” and “objects” for “treatments” and the word treatments for “plot management” or “crop management” or other “proper” word.

 

Line 424: The caption of figures 4 and 5 is not completely related to the graph, find a better title. The author must tell us what the graph is about

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

We would like to thank for comments and suggestions,which help us a lot to enhance the manuscript quality.

We provided the all changes in manuscript, which is attached.

We moved some results from methodology into the the result section.

We removed the duplicate figure. We add environmnetal information.

Beacuse another reviewer did not suggest to remove statistical results, we did not removed it from manuscript.

We corrected the tittle of figure 5 and 6.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript revised as per recommendation and therefore I recommended it for the publication.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is much better. It looks great