Residual Carbon Derived from Different Maize Parts Differed in Soil Organic Carbon Fractions as Affected by Soil Fertility
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Thanks to the authors for submitting this interesting research article; the topic of this investigation is under the scope of the magazine. However, the English language needs to be improved; it is difficult to understand the result of this research. Moreover, there are several issues in the text regarding to English and the technical language. For example, in line 98 it Is use the word “earth” refer to a type of soil texture. On line 105, the word “tow” indicate two treatments. In line 108, the word “screened” is used to indicate a 2mm sieved soil. The figures are also not clear enough to be read. All figures indicate capital letters and small letters. However, the legend, indicates that statistical differences are shown as *,**, and ***. Figure 5 indicates in the x-axis the title of “different treatments” meanwhile, the values are days. Of sampling? The unmeasured pool Is important as % of total organic matter, and it is not clear why it was not measured or if it is referred to as labeled carbon that was loosed by respiration or the carbon in the no decomposed mays organic matter added.
In addition, phrases are not completely clear to review in detail the article. As an example, Lines 408 to 401 indicate, “ On the 5th day of sampling, the proportion of carbon conversion from the root, stem, and leaf residues in the high fertility treatment to POC was higher than that in the low fertility treatment, because in the high fertility treatment, the amount of decomposition and addition of residual was higher than that in the low fertility treatment [32,35,36].” This phrase could be obvious and no explanation of why the decomposition is faster in high-fertility soils is given. In Addition, if less carbon was incorporated because of less decomposition, this could be observed in the experiment. Please, If this is true, add the information.
I could not understand more. please review the English and the technical lenguaje and resubmit.
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Thank you for the invitation to meet your manuscript titled:
Residual carbon derived from different maize parts differed in soil organic carbon fractions as affected by soil fertility. The authors address issues indirectly related to fertilization and the important aspect of soil fertility in today's agriculture and agronomy techniques. The study is interesting, based on experimentation. The material and methods are explained and described in detail. All graphics are presented correctly and are of good quality. I have doubts about the statistical analysis. It needs to be supplemented with detailed information.
Please consider corrections:
The authors used one-factor analysis of variance. Why?
Why then the results for interactions between two factors and more? The analysis includes at least three factors.
Please verify the notation in Material and methods
- in section 3.1. in the text, I propose to put real values for p, the level of significance of the test, additionally interpreting appropriately: for example: .... significantly increased....; ...showed significantly variable trended downward... etc.
- in the captions of the graphs suggests adding an explanation, for the signs when - uppercase letter and when lowercase letter, e.g. A, a; what we are comparing, significant differences for uppercase letters, significant differences for lowercase letters
Line 335: End of sentence or continuation? ".....60 days before decomposition of maize residue [22,23]，Therefore,......"
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
