Relationship between Freezing Tolerance and Leaf Growth during Acclimation in Winter Wheat

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

　This manuscript is discussed about winter wheat growth and freezing tolerance focused on leaf elongation using European 13 cultivars. Authors gained interesting results towards cultivar development to future unstable factors in wheat cultivation such as climate change, development of the technique of cultivation. However, a lot of careless mistakes and insufficient explanations were found.  Further, there were some difficulties in understanding statistical results. The authors should carefully revise the manuscript.

Major comments

1. Cultivars; Authors should explain the reason for selecting 13 cultivars in the experiments.
2. Table1; Table1 could not be found in the manuscript. The authors should show the Table carefully.
3. L103, 107;   Autumn growth rate and the spring growth rate are subjected parameters in the range of 1-5 score scales. In general, the growth rate is a calculated parameter, therefore, “rate” should be deleted.
4. L129 the autumn of 2020; The autumn of 2020 should be finished the cropping season of 2019/2020. According to the context of the paragraph, I guess “2020” should be corrected to “2019”.
5. L186-187 Rlmlist(); Authors should explain Rlmlist because this specific term appears for the first time here. Nothing is in the parenthesis. If authors need to explain Rlmlist, suitable words or phrases should be placed in the parenthesis.
6. L269 Six cultivars; Keep some spaces because of a new paragraph.
7. L278-279,  LT30 of every cultivar at each acclimation period.;  Authors should add (Figure 5) at end of this sentence.
8. L283 (Figure6); Authors should delete this.
9. References; Authors should correct scientific, L473, L506, L509, L510. name as italic.
10. Figures;  The style of all figures is not be unified, for example, some figures have a flame, however, others are flameless.
11. Style of units of Figures; Authors should correct the style of units of Figures as the following example, the left side of the vertical axis: Temperature, ℃ → Temperature (℃)
12. Figure 1;  Figure legends; Blue covered area indicates precipitation in mm and red solid line shows mean daily air temperature in °C. 137 Snow cover is represented in cm as a light blue area.
13. Figure 2;  Statistical results should be shown not symbols but large letters. The score in the unit of the vertical axis should be deleted.
14. Figure 3; Figure legends should be improved because of unclear explanations. Information about cropping season should be explained in the figure legends.
15. Figure 5;  Authors should explain the dots in the boxplots in figure legends.
16. Figure 7;  The bar of the horizontal axis that the range is from -1 to 1 should be deleted because the bar does not correspond to the results of this figure. And authors should explain red and blue symbols in the figure legends.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your report on the manuscript. We highly appreciate the time and effort you put into reading and reviewing our submission. We are happy to see that our research is of interest for publication in Agronomy, after implementation of the changes as suggested by Reviewer. We thank for all insightful comments and in the attached PDF file we describe in detail how we have addressed the issues raised by Reviewer. We think that our manuscript improved through your helpful advice and thank you once again for your efforts.

On behalf of authors,

Kristina Jaškūnė

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The presented research is very interesting and significant. The manuscript does not raise any doubts in terms of content and editing, and is read in the one breath. The combination of analyzes from different breeding conditions is especially valuable. If possible, an exemplary photo from the developed LER measurement method would be a valuable supplement.

Yours sincerely,

Reviewer

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your report on the manuscript. We highly appreciate the time and effort you put into reading and reviewing our submission. We are happy to see the positive evaluations and comments on the manuscript. According to Reviewer's recommendation, we have added a picture of LER measurement panel in the Supplementary material, which is attached below as a PDF file. We think that our manuscript improved through your helpful advice and thank you once again for your efforts.

On behalf of authors,

Kristina Jaškūnė

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I have read your article very carefully and find it very useful for both farmers and research teams working in the fields of phenotyping and selection.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your report on the manuscript. We highly appreciate the time and effort you put into reading and reviewing our submission. We are happy to see the positive evaluations on the manuscript.

On behalf of authors,

Kristina Jaškūnė