Effects of Harvest Stage, Storage, and Preservation Technology on Postharvest Ornamental Value of Cut Peony (Paeonia lactiflora) Flowers
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors congratulations on the work done,
however I would like to ask if you can clarify what is meant for
Tight-bud (TB) stage, Unfold-top (UT) stage and Soft-bud (SB) stage respectively?
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Dear Authors, thank you very much for the opportunity to contribute to your work. Although I am not an expert in the specific topic of ornamental cut flowers, I would like to draw your attention to some shortcomings of the ms.
General comments
I agree, that the topic is interesting and important, however, its specialty requires to draw your attention to the high understandability of the ms. Therefore I suggest to add a paragraph to the introduction section, where the specific terms are described, i.e. bottle life, vase life, and especially the different harvest stages of open-top and unfold-petal types, although these are self-explanatory to some extent.
Tables and figures together with captions should be self-explanatory in terms of abbreviations as well. Please revise them accordingly. Especially Table 3 requires more detailed caption.
The materials and methods part, especially 2.3 requires some revision/rewording in terms of transparency.
It is not clear for me, how were the varieties chosen for the specific investigations? Do you think, that variety has no impact on the outcome? Why didn’t you unify the experiment and used a single variety?
You said, that the propagation material is from a germplasm bank. Are these registered commercial varieties or collected genetic materials/landraces? If the latter is true, how did you ensure the uniformity of the flowers? Were they collected from the same plant? Please elaborate.
My other concern is that I do not see any methodology for the statistical analysis. In table 1 there are significant differences indicated, what about the other data? I don’t see in the text that you would refer to the significance of differences between treatments. You have to indicate when you speak about higher or lower values, whether the difference is significant of not.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
As it was the second round, I accepted all the answers and suggest to publish the paper in present form.
