The Lack of Knowledge on the Microbiome of Golf Turfgrasses Impedes the Development of Successful Microbial Products
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The author should make some revisions on following:
- Too much reference, needs to delete some unnecessary refs.
- Fig. 1. Lack of y-axis, add it.
Author Response
Reviewer 2 suggested adding more references, this reviewer suggested to have fewer. We think 100 references is appropriate for a review/opinion paper. It would be more constructive if the reviewers would identify topics/areas that they would like to see covered in more/less detail. The total number of references is not an important parameter in our opinion.
Fig 1 is a bar chart. The number of papers is on the y-axis. This is labeled accordingly. The number of papers is indicated on top of each bar. We think that adding lines, ticks etc is unnecessary for this figure.
Reviewer 2 Report
the work is complete, well structured, but just a little waek from scientific point of view.
it soounds like a compiled work.
anyway it is very interesting.
i suggest more citations, (i.e. i have many papers usable, but not necessary mines) to consolidate the compiled work
Author Response
If the reviewer doesnt tell us in which areas he/she wants 'more citations', then it is hard to respond accordingly. Reviewer 1 suggested to have fewer references, we think around 100 is appropriate for a review article.
Reviewer 3 Report
This is a review paper about the current knowledge on the microbiome in turfgrasses, structure, ecology and function of the microbiome communities and the possibility of its usage and exploitation in golf courses. The authors evidenced the lack of studies about them in spite of the huge potential of these organisms to improve plant performance instead of chemical products or more aggressive management practices. In general, I think the authors have successfully reflected the current state of the art about the suggested topic, including most of the relevant and updated bibliography on the subject. The manuscript is presented very thoroughly and the text is quite easy to read. Nevertheless, several considerations could be addressed to improve the general performance of the manuscript. All of these aspects have been directly inserted in the attached file which includes the reviewed version of the manuscript.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
We really want to thank this reviewer for reading our manuscript thoroughly and for giving constructive comments. Although there is no list of comments, we respond to the comments in the pdf file one-by-one:
1) Title: We want to keep the title as is, although the reviewer is completely right in pointing out the the bulk of the text is more on ecology, structure and function of microbial communities associated with turfgrasses. But, the main point for writing this paper was to point out the great potential of beneficial microbes for turf and the lack on data on turf microbiomes that would help tremendously to develop better products. We tried to make that clear in the abstract and the conclusions.
Structure of first part: We do not think that the suggested restructuring would make the text more readable as the part on golf courses is not really an introduction. As this is a review/opinion piece, we do not follow the standard intro/results/discussion format, but try to give a comprehensive overview on the topic.
Italicizing latin names. We apologize for this, but this must have happened in the editing stages. We re-formatted the species/genera names in the revised manuscript.
L229ff: Sentence structure: We agree that there were too many thoughts in this paragraph. We streamlined this section in the revised version.
L293ff: We agree that this is an important hypothesis that needs to be tested carefully. At this point, this is mere speculation. We did change the wording now in L300-302 to indicate that.
