Developing Management Practices in: “Living Labs” That Result in Healthy Soils for the Future, Contributing to Sustainable Development

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

See separate file

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Reaction to reviewer 1 of the invited Bouma/Veerman opinion paper.

We thank the reviewer for his thorough comments that are highly appreciated and we react as follows:

1. Spelling errors have been corrected. Some of the spaces in the manuscript follow from the word software providing a straight lining on the right side. We have made corrections.
2. The reviewer raises valid points. Of course, climate change and food crises are covered by the SDGs and this also applies to the planetary boundaries. The SDGs are aimed at the year 2030 and they certainly don’t and should not necessarily represent the long term. The reviewer is right. We have added sentences emphasizing this ( l.61,222-225). We do feel that Goals are an aim and  not a means to reach  goals ( the ecosystem services are) but the temporary aspect should indeed be emphasized.
3. The reviewer is correct. We do indeed emphasize LL’s as a vehicle to really and finally connect the research and stakeholder community as a condition for real progress. We have added an example of an exploratory LL study recently published elsewhere to make the LL story more specific as it was still rather abstract in the paper as submitted. We have changed the title as suggested. Thanks for the suggestion.
4. The threshold issue is indeed complex. We consider soil health to reflect actual conditions at a given time and place, whatever they may be as a function of landscape position, purpose ( indeed to be defined by the selected ecosystem services). We see our contribution to the indicator/threshold discussion as a contribution to an ongoing discussion process ( referring to a publicatuion that has yet to appear is a bit difficult, by the way)and emphasize that now in the tekst ( l.154-157). There still is no final verdict as to a common listing and there probably never will be. Our particular contribution is the link to a real LL, warts and all, and to soil conditions that directly affect rootgrowth (l.253). The latter is important. We have added a description of intriguing developments in the USA where the National Soil Health Institute has moved beyond what seemed to become a rather sterile academic discussion on indicators by initiating solid economic studies of farming systems following regenerative practices ( that generally are associated with positive soil health indicators). But they find that even well documented LL’s where netto income is significantly higher is still not convincing for many farmers. This seems to become the real issue with a strong social component. But in doing so they have received support from major agricultural enterprises and the policy arena and this really puts soils on the map! Still , many farmers don’t accept generative agriculture and there are  barriers to take.

Specific comments:

25: good point! Changed the phrase. Thanks.

28: we feel that we covered the five indicators suggested by us in substantial detail , also by adding now more details on the case study in Table 1. and we describe how thresholds were estimated while indicating that more research is certainly needed.

63-71 Yes, correct. We have added a sentence. But there still is a wide variety. Note that the US National Soil Health Instituten ( in desperation perhaps) now moved to only three indicators, which clearly is inadequate.

76-78 We feel that by taking the perspective of plant roots, we can contribute to a single system ( line 250).

93. Numbers were added; they were presented in the submitted manuscript but apparently removed.

109 we changed the phrase and now refer to the area of land being used. Thanks, good point.( l26,523).

123 and 186. We modified the figures. Sorry. The first figure was alreday published and mistakes in figure 2 should have been avoided.

136. Intriguing point. We feel that in some soil science circles ( not everywhere) there still is a broad feeling that “soils can do it” and this is what we want to show and disagree with. This explains the reference. That’s why we specifically describe major and decisive contributions by other disciplines.

220-221. Also an important point showing that the reviewer has really read the paper. We appreciate this very much. This sentence sugegsts there is a general indicator for soil health while we state earlier that in the “one-out/all-out”system  we only look at five indicators while ackowledghing that defining a single indicator is very difficult ( see the complicated and unconvincing efforts by the Cornell soil health crowd). The sentence was changed.

Other comments referred to text corrections that have been made, Thanks again.

 

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Comment #1

The current title is cumbersome.   Would something like the following work: “Developing and Implementing Practices that Result in Healthy Soils and Contribute to Sustainable Development”.

Comment #2

The abstract should be more concise.  Some of the information in the current abstract represents background information, and thus can be moved to the primary sections of the paper.

Comment #3

Several of the sub-sections have a question for their title.  This seems awkward to me.  I recommend that you not use a question for the sub-section titles.

Comment #4

Reword the first sentence of section 3.

Comment #5

On line 112, the last word should be “will”.

Comment #6

I don’t have a problem with you using soil nutrients as soil health indicators.  However, I was disappointed with your discussion in sub-section 5.6.  What are your thoughts regarding the data that needs to be collected and analyzed with respect to this soil health indicator?

Comment #7

Economics and social science were included in figure 2.  Obviously, these disciplines need to be included.  One of the first questions that will be asked by these disciplines is whether there are tradeoffs between your soil health indicators.  Are some of the indicators more important than others?  These questions will be important to examining the adoption of practices and when gauging the cost of improving soil health.

 

 

Author Response

Reaction to reviewer 3 of the invited Bouma/Veerman opinion paper.

We thank the reviewer or his or her comments. Our reaction:

1. The current title has been modified. Following reviewer 1 we have added the :”Living Labs” in the title because they are important in this opinion paper and just mention “Developing” provides less focus and would be fuzzy. But we have followed the suggestion of this reviewer to change the question mark. As this paper is part of the “Soils of the future”special issue of LAND, we could not resist to put this phrase in. The new title is better than the old one. Thanks for the suggestion.
2. Good and relevant question about the abstract. The reviewer is certainly correct if this would have been a research paper. But it is an opinion paper and then, in our view, the absrtract should present a logical, general line of reasoning. We considered taking the SDG part out but then the rest of the text would be unfocused. Also noting that the other two reviewers saw no problem here we suggest to leave the abstrcat as is, even though we sympathise with this particular reviewer.
3. Good point. We rephrased the titles of sections 2 and 4.
4. We have reworded the sentence. “at least seven will have to be considered” that was too pushy and unneeded. We now say: “we will discuss seven aspects”. Good point.
5. Change made
6. We have added text here to better explain why we feel that we should connect here with extensive and successful soil fertility programs in many countries based on local expert knowlegde and much practical experience. Why do it all over again as part of a soil health program? But the question is relevant and we added text to explain this better ( lines 409-410 and 413-415). At the same time we feel that precision fertilization ( and biocide application) is a viable and desirable future perspective and we also expres that opinion.
7. Interesting point again. Figure 2 was prepared to show that soils are part of a long chain ( when dealing with agriculture, many other disciplines are involved; agronomy, hydrology, meteorology, etc). In our paper the :”in-out/all out”principle ( section 5.1) is key: we find that it is impossible to say which soil health indicator is most important. That will differ in different contexts. And when trying to improve a given indicator we may find that economic considerations may kill our recommendations. Achieving SDGs are the societal objective, not soil health. Text was added to show this broader dimension( l. 208-220). We thank the reviewer for raising this issue.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Soil Health has been studied for many years, so far, however, there is no unified procedure to assess soil health with indicators that can be determined by operational methods under practical conditions, considering critical cost and required time aspects. From this point of view, this paper is relevant.

The authors discuss a multidisciplinary integrated approach to soil assessment. The title corresponds well to the content of the paper, but the keywords require specification and clarification.

It is also necessary to formulate the research objectives more clearly. In addition, the authors completely omitted the description of the research methodology. This needs to be corrected, since it is not entirely clear what the merit of the authors is in the very necessary and correct statements presented.

Apparently, the lack of methodology and protocol of the study affected the lack of clarity of the authors' contribution to the results and conclusions. The conclusions, in my opinion, are somewhat divorced from the results. Probably the reason for this is also the lack of a research protocol. This needs to be fixed.

The paper will be of interest to a wide range of readers whose scientific interests are related to soil ecology. However, the paper requires a major revision.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

The title of the paper is significantly improved. Authors should check the necessity of ":" and "?" in the title of the paper.

The authors clarified the purpose of the study, which is to explore contributions that the soil science discipline can make in the near future by embracing the soil health concept thereby contributing to the development of innovative management practices that can alleviate problems being encountered. However, it is not clear from this formulation which "innovative methods" and "problems" the authors are investigating. This should be clarified in this section. The authors also position the study of the contribution of soil science. However, it is not at all clear how this study was conducted. There is doubt that this study was conducted.

I will explain why I have such an assumption. The authors did not indicate any sources of information that they used to solve this problem. Which databases were analyzed? What criteria did the authors use to search for information? What keywords were searched for? For what period of time was the search for information conducted? How many relevant papers were found? In what language were these papers published? What criteria were used to include or exclude the found paper from the analysis? How many papers were included in the analysis as a result? The authors need to answer all these questions and give a detailed result of this study. Or the authors should reconsider the research goal and their scientific contribution to solving the problem.

Also, the authors should draw up a list of references according to the requirements of the journal. The list of references itself is extremely insufficient to review modern research on the analyzed problem.

Author Response

Reaction to second comments by reviewer 3.

There still seems to be a misunderstanding about the character of this ( invited) review paper. This is not a research paper with a materials and methods section, results and discussion and conclusions, to be based on a solid literature review. The reviewer is correct: this is what one might expect from a research paper. But this is an opinion paper!

In reaction to the first three reviews of this paper we included more emphasis on  a research paper published elsewhere, that was based on a case study of a Living lab. ( Bouma et al 2022, published in Soil Systems, another journal within the MDPI group). We focused there on soil contributions to ecosystem services and the work was based on a thorough literature review ( 55 references).  This was a research paper  and was judged and approved as such.

This opinion paper intends to place this local exploratory case study in a  much broader context as to how soil science should deal with the challenges of sustainable development. This is crucial for :”Soils of the Future”! We focus  on the UN-SDGs and its implications. With soil health as a central concept to characterize soils, we discuss in this paper how this concept is handled now in the world and and how we  should move towards the future. We cover work in the USA , Europe ( “A Soil Deal for Europe”, with prof, Veerman as chair of the Mission Board) and Australia, all based on personal contacts with these research groups.  We also exclusively focus now on soil health, mentioning that in the other paper  ecosystem services were covered  for that particular farm being studied.  Adding Table 1 to the revised manuscript was intended to better illustrate the link with the previous paper and illustrate that we did not produce loose statements. We also discuss the Living Lab concept and its implications while this was just a starting point in the other paper, that focused on how to address the issue at a given farm.

To even more clearly illustrate the character of this opinion paper we added now additional text on the case study in lines 62-63 and 157-158 .

We also like to point out that in discussing the soil indicators in this paper, we certainly refer  to innovative methodology, which was thoroughly discussed in the case study (in the context of a research paper). But also see in this paper reference to innovative technology : for soil carbon lines 337-340; for soil structure lines 375-378 and for soil water regimes: empirical procedures, line 431, modeling section 3, point 6 with several references, see line 434, and pedotransferfunctions on line 446  We indicated ( with substantial literature) the problems with soil biodiversity where as yet no indicators and thresholds are defined. A real problem.

The literature in this opinion paper ( 53 references) was carefully selected and , as stated above, was based on assessing the broader context in which soil health has to be seen. The paper results in a number of conclusions that, we feel, are important for the research field to consider for the future. This is our well documented opinion that will not necessarity be shared by all colleagues but this can, and should , be the basis for further discussions..

Author Response File: Author Response.docx