Investigating the Role of Terminal Stolon of Marine Invasive Green Macroalga Caulerpa taxifolia in the Removal of Inorganic Nitrogen from Seawater
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Huang et al investigated the role of terminal stolon of marine invasive green macroalga Caulerpa taxifolia in the removal of inorganic nitrogen from seawater which seems quite interesting. The study is interesting; however, the presentation of the data is not up to the mark at some points. Therefore, I would recommend a major revision of the manuscript. The specific comments are the following:
1. The title must be changed to “ Investigating the role of terminal stolon of marine invasive green macroalga Caulerpa taxifolia in the removal of inorganic nitrogen from seawater”
2. The manuscript has a lot of typos and grammatical mistakes and must be addressed throughout.
3. Line 105: Salinity unit?
4. Line 107: Spectrophotometer, salinity indicator, and photometer instruments model and manufacturers.
5. Line 128-129: write the complete recipe for seawater here. Moreover, the values of (NH4)2SO4
6. and NaNO2 should be written in mg instead of g.
7. Line 133: Salinity unit?
8. Did the authors prepare the standard curve and drive the equation for the quantitative analysis of NH4-N and NO2-N by hypobromite oxidation and naphthalene ethylenediamine methods? If not, how quantification was done without any standard equation?
9. Line 172: Unit of concentration??
10. Line 172-173: Merge the following sentences and rewrite. “The lowest NH4-N concentration was 0.02475 (unit). And it appeared since the experiment was carried out 8 or 16 hours later.”
11. Since the language of this journal is English, remove other languages from all the figures. It is a bit confusing, and most of the readers of the journal will not understand.
12. In each figure, the significant differences between the samples should be added as asterisks (***). The caption of figures must be elaborated.
13. Line 195: “The highest NO2-N removing efficiency of the terminal stolon of samples was 9.236%” here there is no standard deviation, how many times the experimentation was performed? The data shows 9.236% which must be presented up to 2 significant figures only.
14. Lines 228-230: The significant figures of each data should be presented up to 2.
15. The conclusion section is missing.
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for your comments and professional advice. These opinions help to improve academic rigor of our article. Based on your suggestion and request, we have made corrected modifications on the revised manuscript. Meanwhile, the manuscript had be reviewed and edited by a native English editor. We hope that our work can be improved again. Furthermore, we would like to show the details at the attachment.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript has been written very poorly, English style, grammar, and sentence structure are completely wrong throughout the text, making it very hard to read and understand. The methodology was poorly explained. The method description for the nutrient determination is too short and wrong. Measurement units are missing.
Specific comments were given in the manuscript until the results section as the rest was very hard to read and I had to guess what the authors wanted to say with some sentences. Please make a thorough revision of the methods, English style and grammar, units and overall writing style. I have not reviewed the section after the experimental part as it is very badly written.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear reviewer,
Thank you very much for your comments and professional advice. These opinions help to improve academic rigor of our article. Based on your suggestion and request, we have made corrected modifications on the revised manuscript. Meanwhile, the manuscript had be reviewed and edited by a native English editor. We hope that our work can be improved again. Furthermore, we would like to show the details at the attachment.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript has been thoroughly revised and English style and grammar have been drastically improved. The manuscript is now well-written understandable, interesting to read and easy to follow. I wish to congratulate the authors for their effort.
