Preliminary Research on Agricultural Cultivation Decreasing Amino Sugar Accumulation in Calcareous Soils in Subtropical Karst Region of China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

After my careful evaluation, the paper is well organized, but it has some errors. You can find my detailed comments in the paper,

Best wishes,

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you so much for listing 16 valuable comments in the annotations in the document, and we have finished the responses. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is well written and presents interesting results. Karst ecosystem is a fragile ecosystem with notable contradictions between human and land. Residents in these karst mountain areas reclaim natural reserved land for agricultural use, which could have significant effect on soil carbon sequestration or dynamics. Microbial residues could be important contributor to soil organic carbon pool, which is also a popular topic in terrestrial ecosystem research in recent years. Thus, I believe this manuscript is suitable to the LAND journal and interesting to its readers. I have only some minor comments.

 

Introduction:

The hypotheses came up abruptly. I do not read any reasons why you hypothesize like this. For example, you hypothesize that (1) the reclamation and continued cultivation of natural woodlands in karst ecosystems will lead to a decrease in microbial residues. Before this hypothesis, you should provide some knowledge to the reader why you hypothesize this but not increase or other way. The same to other two hypotheses.

Likely, in the last paragraph, before you state that this study will investigate soils with different cultivation time, you should provide the significance of do this. Why it is better to study soils with a time series than soil from only one certain time? This should be clearly described in the introduction, which could make your paper more interesting to read.

 

Line 79: “this hypothesis” should be “these hypotheses”

 

Materials and Methods:

This part is clearly written.

Line 145: ‘0.05’ should not be in italic.

 

Results and Discussion

These parts are also clear. Some details should be improved.

 

Line 166: “increase slowly and then decrease rapidly”. You should not use slow or rapid to describe the trend here, because in the Fig. 3 the x-axis, i.e., time series, did not increase evenly. When you say slow or rapid, it depends on changing rate, e.g., g·kg^-1·year^-1. It is better to use significantly here.

 

Line 194: “acumination of TASs” should be “accumulation of ASs”?

Line 203: remove “were” from “were increased”.

Line 208: you should provide reference to support “In the absence of nutrients in the soil, ASs could be utilized preferentially as an energy source to supply microorganisms with C and N”.

Line 242: likely, a reference is needed.

 

Conclusions

The conclusion is not powerful enough to me. The authors should improve it.

Line 284: you mean long-term cultivation will reduce the soil ASs? In the results, it increased in the first year.

Usually, the conclusion ends with a sentence to describe the implication of results, which could expand the findings here to a general knowledge. But in current version, the conclusion ends sort of hastily.

Author Response

Thank you very much for your valuable revisions according to the outline of the article, and we have finished the responses. Please see the attachment.

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Reviewer 3 Report

Dear Authors,

the paper is surely interesting and suitable for publications after minor revision. I suggest you to add a table, after the soil classification, with the principal chemical characteristics of it. In the title I suggest to include a sentence as " preliminary results" or " first results" because you just described the data of one year. For being suitable, the data in agronomy, but even in all the research on soil and its changements, needs to be supported by at least three years of repeated sampling. So you have to change also the discussions and the conclusions to be coherent with the title

Author Response

Thank you very much for your valuable comments on the article, and we have finished the responses. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx