Effects of Five Consecutive Years of Fallow Tillage on Soil Microbial Community Structure and Winter Wheat Yield

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (New Reviewer)

I found the manuscript submitted for review to be interesting and well written. The undertaken research issue is current and needed in science and agricultural practice in many regions of the world.

The authors made an effective attempt to explain the multidirectional dependencies regarding the method of cultivating fallow land: no tillage (NT), subsoiling (ST) and deep plowing (DP). The conducted comprehensive research (physical and chemical properties of the soil, the structure of communities and the composition of soil bacteria and fungi in 2 soil layers) showed many cause and effect relationships. In my opinion, the most important findings concern the statement that subsoiling and deep plowing had a positive effect on the accumulation and use of natural precipitation and the improvement of the structure of soil microorganisms. Moreover, soil physicochemical properties (SWC, SOC, DOC and DON) were closely related to the soil microbial community. This shows how important the "biological life" in the soil is - by properly managing the possible ways of cultivating fallow land, you can influence the quality of the soil, and thus the yield of cultivated plants.

In my opinion, the article meets the substantive requirements and can be published in Agronomy. The records of the units in the manuscript require technical adjustment so that they are consistent with the records in the SI system.

December 23, 2022

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report (New Reviewer)

Congratulations on a well-organized, easy-to-understand and readable work. Innovative approach to research. The topic is very interesting, the purpose and implementation of the article are clear, and the information provided is informative. The contribution of the article is clear and it will certainly become the work of researchers in this field. This article contains some technical issues that will need to be resolved before the manuscript is ready for publication.

Author Response

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This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for your manuscript. Although the data provided may be important as a database, unfortunately it was not clear why understanding the changes of microbial community structure and metabolic function can improve our understanding for sustainable development of farmland. In addition, information about plant growth was not discussed well. Soil water content or nutrients should be affected by plants, so the information is essential. Finally, this study has lack of novelty; soil chemical and physical data affected by tillage were reported by a number of studies. Therefore, unfortunately, I cannot recommend publication of this study.

 

L13:

What do you mean “stabilizing”?

 

L14: localization experiment

What do you mean “localization experiment”?

 

L39: Therefore, elucidating the changes of microbial community structure and metabolic function in different soil layers caused by tillage can provide a theoretical basis for the sustainable development of farmland.

Why elucidating the changes of microbial community structure and metabolic function in different soil layers caused by tillage provides a theoretical basis for the sustainable development of farmland? It is not clearly shown in the introduction.

 

L128: trogen 150 kg ha-1, P2O5 38 kg ha-1, K2O 75kg ha-1

In which form you applied them?

 

L240: The experiments used Microsoft Excel 2010 for data sorting and graphing,

Not needed.

 

L185: The first part was air-dried and used to determine soil physical and chemical indexes such as soil bulk density, pH

How to determine bulk density using the soil after sieving. Bulk density should be measured using unsieved soil.

 

L188: The second soil was stored in the refrigerator at 4 °C and dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and dissolved organic nitrogen (DON) were determined.

How to extract DOC and DON?

 

L241: LSD postmortem test was used to compare the differences between tillage methods

In statistics, LSD is not recommended now.

 

L487: was found that subsoiling-tillage and deep plowing during the fallow period could significantly reduce the BD of the 0–20 cm soil layer

It is a matter of course. I guess this discussion is not needed.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors

You still need to do many efforts before you can publish your MS in the high-impacted journal. There are extensive English editing urgently required, results presentation, discussion, and conclusion. There were many published articles discussing and describing the effects of tilling of soil on microbe community and soil structure (see below), so what will your article add to the already published knowledge? 

Thanks and regards 

 

Sun R, Li W, Dong W, Tian Y, Hu C and Liu B (2018) Tillage Changes Vertical Distribution of Soil Bacterial and Fungal Communities. Front. Microbiol. 9:699. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2018.00699

Barnard, R. L., Osborne, C. A., and Firestone, M. K. (2013). Responses of soil bacterial and fungal communities to extreme desiccation

Basic, F., Kisic, I., Mesic, M., Nestroy, O., and Butorac, A. (2004). Tillage and crop management effects on soil erosion in central Croatia. Soil Tillage Res. 78, 197–206. doi: 10.1016/j.still.2004.02.007

Carter, M. R. (1986). Microbial biomass as an index for tillage-induced changes in soil biological properties. Soil Tillage Res. 7, 29–40. doi: 10.1016/0167-1987(86) 90005-X

Chen, J., Zheng, M. J., Pang, D. W., Yin, Y. P., Han, M. M., Li, Y. X., et al. (2017). Straw return and appropriate tillage method improve grain yield and nitrogen efficiency of winter wheat. J. Integr. Agric. 16, 1708–1719. doi: 10.1016/S2095- 3119(16)61589-7 Chu, H., and Grogan, P. (2010). Soil microbial biomass, nutrient availability and nitrogen mineralization potential among vegetation-types in a low arctic tundra landscape. Plant Soil 329, 411–420. doi: 10.1007/s11104-009-0167-y Clarke, K. R. (1993). Non-parametric multivariate analyses of changes in community structure. Aust. J. Ecol. 18, 117–143. doi: 10.1111/j.1442-9993.1993. tb00438.x

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Authors should work on figures and paper format as 2 figures (4 and %) are not readable at all and concentration of results may not allow understanding the meaning. 

Conclusions are too brief as compared to results description; information about future research should be valuable and necessary.

 

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

the work entitled: "Effects of recreational tillage on soil microbial community structure and metabolic function in different soil layers" is certainly of interest can be useful both for the scientific community and for those working in the agricultural field.

Below I point out some shortcomings and provide some suggestions that could be useful to improve the article:

In the introduction it would be nice to  briefly define recreational tillage and the underline difference with the conventional;

Lime 53 "plowing can" (space needed) and other in the text;

Lines 60-63: it is worth mentioning the few studies on "response of soil microbial communities under different soil layers to tillage practices";

Table 2: check the depth of ST and DP;

In some paragraphs of the results there are parts that would be moved into discussions. For example lines 257-263, 281-286, 351-354.

In 3.3 standard deviation for bacteria is missing;

I recommend reviewing paragraphs 4.2 and 4.3 better because in some cases there are repetitions. In my opinion they should be better defined and/or summarized or you could consider merging them.

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Reviewer 5 Report

The study “Effects of recreational tillage on soil microbial community structure and metabolic function in different soil layers” conducted by Zhong et al described significant effects of the soil layer and different tillage on the microbial diversity and metabolic function using amplicon sequencing data and PICRUSt2 predictions. The paper is well organized, but I have some major concerns:

 

1.     The author should provide more detail in the statistical and bioinformatic analysis. The description is not matching the result you have shown in the tables.

2.     The author should very carefully use PICRUSt2 on 16s or ITS to predict the function. Most of the time, 16s and ITS are only used for exploring microbial taxonomy and diversity. It is not quite convincing that the author talk about function genes or certain pathway enhanced using 16s data. The author may need to add a discussion on the limitation of using 16s to predict microbial function.

 

 

Minor concern:

Line 18:

Add a p-value after the sentence that mentioned “significantly increase or decrease”

 

Lines 12-25 you didn’t mention the effects of different tillage on microbial metabolic function in the abstract

 

Line 35 “but also play…role..” What is the important role in carbon and nitrogen cycling? The decomposition of organic matter is included in C and N cycling. Please rephrase.

 

Line 37 There are a lot of papers talking about microbial structure in different soil layers. Please find out what your study can provide to agricultural research.

 

Line 124 rephrase the sentence

 

Line 130 be more specific, what measures? Other soil properties? If so, please describe it.

 

Line 116-130 Any operations for trying to be avoiding the amination during the sampling?

 

Line 182 What is the five-point method?

 

Line 184 how far away from the plant roots? Give a general range.

 

Line  184 “Three replicates…” How did you get those three replicates for each treatment? How many blocks you do have in your field design

 

Line 191 How long did you keep the soil in -the 80 freezer?

 

Line232-233 What do you mean by “Non-singleton ASV used to construct …”?

Capitalize tmatfft andfastere, what is fastree2t???

 

Line 226-237 You didn’t mention how to process the fungal data

 

Line 236 “classify-skllearnïve Bayes taxonomy classifier”??   change to ” sklearn-based naïve Bayes taxonomy classifier”

 

Line 239-243 One-way anova? Did you check the block effect? Is that significant? If block effect is significant, you cannot use one-way anova. And you sure it is one-way? Not two-way anova?

 

Line 243 How you predict functions with PICRUSt2. Be more specific

 

Figure 4 and 5 Can’t see the whole figures due to the formatting problem.

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Well, I did not find sufficient revision.

Plant growth data are still lacking.

Novelty is still not clear (novelty does not mean "not reported by many studies.")

I did not find what is the new information that improved agricultural practice.

But, I leave the decision of the acceptance of the paper to the editor, because other reviewers seem to agree with the publication of this study.

Thank you.

Reviewer 2 Report

You did well as you can to improve your manuscript, but from my side, your MS will not add new to the already published information and findings in this field.

best of luck