Effect of Vegetation Restoration on Soil Humus and Aggregate Stability within the Karst Region of Southwest China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Following questions and suggestions needs to be addressed:

Line102 page3: rephrase the sentence.

Line 103-107: is the repetition of concept at page 2 line 47-50.

Line 135:Needs correction in sentence: 70% of what?

Line 144-149: Please use again your full form of abbreviations here for better understanding

Material and method section: Needs substantial improvement and details:

No detail is given about vegetation density, cover, diversity and period since vegetation is there as compared to control site of AL.

Is there any human intervention in planting, irrigating or soil disturbance practices?

What is the total area of selected site? And why only 3 quadrates were taken? Method of quadrate sampling?

Total soil sample size?

Line 187-210: describe the significance of all these parameters and how they are different from each others?

Results:

Why pH is high in SR only.? We are comparing the sites with different soil texture…!!! Can we compare them for these types of studies? If they have same origin then why soil texture is different: any explanation?

Quality of all figures is poor and need to improve

Figure 2: in legend there is “2-1 mm” , I think it should be “1-2 mm”

Figure 3 and Figure 4 do not have the letters showing significance of data. Are they all non-significant?

Figures are showing non-significance for HA and FA but in text they are described as different..needs correction.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The research addresses an important theme concerning the principles of soil structure stability restoration, namely: effects of vegetation restoration on the soil physical and chemical properties, impacts of vegetation restoration on the soil aggregate stability and influence of vegetation restoration on soil humus components in karst areas and to explore the changes in humus components at the different vegetation recovery stages and their response mechanisms to aggregate stability.

However, the paper needs to be improved in order to be better understood internationally. I consider the following improvements necessary:

- the abstract is too long, it needs to be summarized, and I recommend using abbreviations as little as possible; the abstract should be summarized so that it is a thumbnail of the paper; currently there is no purpose of the paper in the abstract and no sentence related to the methodology of the paper.

- in the material and research method there is a lack of data on soils, soil type (international equivalence) in the research area and on which the research was carried out; there is a lack of method for determining pH, texture (sand, silt and clay); 

- what is the method used to determine the type of vegetation?

- describe the characteristics of the experimental variants: AL, GL, SR, SL and SF.

- defining the different stages of revegetation.

- the quality of the graphs needs to be improved; 

Minor editing of English language required.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf