Effect of Different Mulching Practices on Bacterial Community Composition and Fruit Quality in a Citrus Orchard

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Line 9-37: According to the author guidelines the abstract should not exceed 200 words. This abstract is over 400 words. Please shorten it according to the guidelines!

Line 31: "Vc" as an abbreviation has not been described in the abstract.

Line 36: "soil composition" - meaning "soil microbial composition"/"soil bacterial composition"?

Line 37: "core flora's functionalities". Does this refer to the microbes or the plant grown? If the microbes are intended then it should be "core biota" since "flora" is according to the old classification. 

Line 46: What would "special materials" be..? 

Lines 46-73: this section is messy, moving back and forth between examples of inorganic and organic mulching materials. This section could be improved considerably. Now it's a line-up of examples but not really any text driving it forward. 

Line 74-76: "microbial communities in soil are fundamentally made up of bacteria". True. But it's also made up of fungi and other microbes, as well as nematodes and soil-dwelling animals that also have a huge impact of nutrient cycling. 

Line 82-83: "mulching practices can alter the microbial community composition and diversity by improving the soil physicochemical environment". Please give examples of which improvements you are referring to. 

Line 112-114: The hypothesis. In the introduction you have already mentioned that mulching indeed has an effect on the composition of microbes in the soil, so this hypothesis is rather a given already. 

Line 146: In mid December 2021 samples were taken - how long had the trees been standing there then? How long had the mulching been going on? Had the organic mulching been added more than once?
"5 samples trees were selected" - randomly? Or based on what grounds?

Line 148-149: If the 5 soil samples were mixed together as one, was 3 replicates taken from that mix? Or were 5 soil samples collected 3 times? If the 3 replicates came from the same soil mixture then these would be technical replicates and not biological replicates. This is important to know for the reader since it can have a large effect on the statistical analyses. 

Lines 154-156: here it would be good to know if there was a large variation within the treatments concerning fruit size and quality. Since fruits of uniform sizes were selected it could have been very easy to unintentionally skew the results in a certain direction. Please describe more in detail why it was chosen to do it in this manner. 

Lines 162-163: "fruit shape indices" - are these what are referred to as "thickness indicator" and "thin" later on in the results? Please clarify!

Lines 213-214: thickest and thinnest - how was this measured? not clear from m&m. 

Line 217: "Five treatments..." = all mulching treatments..? 

ALL table and figure texts are in need of more information. It's not enough to just mention the abbreviations of the treatments - these need to be explained in all of the texts. 

Table 1: why is TSS/TA interesting to look at? Also those abbreviations need explanations in the table text.

Lines 227-229: Please rephrase this sentence. 

Table 2: there's no reference to table 2 in the text.

Lines 238-239: where can it be seen that the diversity of RM was higher than the other mulching treatments..?

Figure 2: far too small text in the figure to be able to read it. 

Line 274: "...extremely significantly different..." - it's either significantly different or not. Not extremely significantly different. Rephrase.

Lines 296-300: it doesn't seem like the differences between the networks were very large. Can this be tested for significance as well?

Line 324: in the figure text write the full analysis name of RDA for clarity

Lines 371-377: I can't see how these sentences are connected. Please rephrase the beginning of the discussion. 

Line 387: Regarding the "reflective membrane" - was this applied in all the treatments..? It's difficult in this section to understand if you are referring to a certain treatment or to all of them.

Lines 392-413: very little of the information given in this section actually relates to your results. Please condense the text to what is really important seen from the results that you have.

Lines 414-437: I don't understand why the title of the section if that "mulching practices improve the soil bacterial composition" - how do you know that? From what is seen in the results the diversity of bacteria was reduced in all mulching treatments - this is not something that is generally considered beneficial. It could of course be that certain bacteria are promoted and that those are generally beneficial to have, but it doesn't seem like it here. And in line 432 it's stated that "...primarily due to variations in nutrient availability." - was this investigated..?

Lines 438-452: repetition of results. Please remove. 

Line 546-548: It's very unclear to me why RM is said to have achieved the "best results". Please explain what it is specifically that makes it the best. 

Lines 550-552: please avoid repetition of results in the conclusion. I suggest a re-write of the conclusion where you focus on the big picture. 

 

 

 

Some issues in the text with spelling mistakes, otherwise the level of English is fine. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

On behalf of all authors, I really appreciate your careful review of the manuscript. I have carefully revised the comments and suggestions of the manuscript. All changes in the text were marked in revision mode.

 I hope my revisions and answers have met your requirements. If there are any questions or things that have not been modified and improved, I am happy to further improve them.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, 

 

I would like to thank you very much for the invitation as a reviewer for the manuscript Agriculture-2566982 " High-throughput absolute quantification sequencing reveals the effect of different mulching practices on bacterial community composition and fruit quality in a citrus orchard.” The article is very interesting. The aim of the study was to investigate the effect of different mulching on soil microbiota and some fruit quality parameters. The authors found interesting data concerning the impact of various mulching materials on soil ecology and citrus quality.

The article meets the requirements of the Agriculture journal, but it needs explanation, clarification, and some information adding. 

 

Title of the manuscript

 

1) The title of the manuscript looks too long. The “high-throughput absolute quantification” belongs to the method of study. It was not studied directly in this work. The aim of the research is investigation of “the effect of different mulching practices on bacterial community composition and fruit quality in a citrus orchard”. It could be the title of the article and “the high throughput absolute quantification” could be one of the keywords. 

 

Abstract

 

2) Lines 31 and 32. The abbreviation “Gp13” and “Vc” should be clarified.

 

 Materials and Methods

 

3) Line 121. A typo: “… silt loam …”

 

4) Line 133. The abbreviation “RF” should be clarified

 

5) Line 142. The application rate looks very high, please justify the choice of such a high application rate for annual use.

 

6) Line 193. The abbreviation “ACE” has several clarifications. Please give its meaning.

 

7) Line 199. What means “R” abbreviation.

 

8) Line 216. Typo: “ RM and BM treatments …”

 

Results

 

9) Lines 216-217. According to Table 1 RM and BM have significant difference with TM treatment only.

TSS is only one from many others fruit quality parameters and it would be better to conclude the impact on fruit quality based on several parameters. Is it possible to draw such a conclusion based on TSS only?

 

10) Line 231. Table 2.  “factor 1, factor 2, factor 3, U1, U2 , U3” What means these names and abbreviations? They must be described in the  Materials and Methods.

 

11) Lines 277-279. What means “close clustering” and “close clustering separated by a certain distance”.  Is it significant or not?

.

 

12) Line 317. What does the “SH” abbreviation mean?

 

Discussion

 

13) Line 396-399. It is not clear from this sentence how the fungal diversity, soil temperature and ph influence the broomcorn millet yield and how does this relate to the results of this study?

 

14) According to the template the Discussion Section should be as follows:

“Authors should discuss the results and how they can be interpreted from the perspective of previous studies and of the working hypotheses. The findings and their implications should be discussed in the broadest context possible. Future research directions may also be highlighted.”

 

In this manuscript authors did not study the effect of mulching on soil pH, nitrogen and organic carbon.

 

 

Reference

 

15) According to the Instructions for Authors the Journal name should be in italic, Year bold and Volume in italic.

1. Author 1, A.B.; Author 2, C.D. Title of the article. Abbreviated Journal Name Year, Volume, page range.

Please, check the Reference list on the Instructions for authors. https://www.mdpi.com/journal/agriculture/instructions

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

On behalf of all authors, I really appreciate your careful review of the manuscript. We appreciate the previous time and effort that you and reviewers dedicated to reviewing our manuscript and providing valuable comments and suggestions. All changes in the text were marked in revision mode.

 I hope my revisions and answers have met your requirements. If there are any questions or things that have not been modified and improved, I am happy to further improve them.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The article entitled "high-throughput absolute quantification sequencing reveals the effect of different mulching practices on bacterial community composition and fruit quality in a citrus orchard" is well-written however it has some problems regarding the visualization of the results. The resolution of some figures is insufficient (like Figure 2). In addition, the descriptions to the figures should be clear and allow full understanding of the figure. In the case of many figures, an explanation of the main abbreviations used in the figures should be added, returning to the place of introduction in the main text is inconvenient. On Figure 2 You should decide if You want to show the relative or absolute abundance; current form is missleading. On figure 5 it would be nice to add the "r" values. On Figure 7 predicted functions of what? What is the scale?

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

On behalf of all authors, I really appreciate your careful review of the manuscript. We appreciate the previous time and effort that you and reviewers dedicated to reviewing our manuscript and providing valuable comments and suggestions. All changes in the text were marked in revision mode.

I hope my revisions and answers have met your requirements. If there are any questions or things that have not been modified and improved, I am happy to further improve them.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx