The Response of Soil Nutrients and Microbial Community Structures in Long-Term Tea Plantations and Diverse Agroforestry Intercropping Systems

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, I thank you for the invitation to review your work and to contribute for its development. I found the study very interesting and valuable, however, there are issues that need further improvements.

General comments:

Abbreviations in the abstract needs to be defined.

I think, that the materials and methods part can further be elaborated, especially the OMT – were O and M alternating or one row of O and one row of A, etc. The brief summary of the management should also be added here.

I don’t understand why the control has the abbreviation of CK. Maybe it is subjective, but for me it is a bit misleading. I suggest using simply C instead, as this is the general abbreviation of the control.

The discussion section starts very promising, but the dealing with the discussion of the CCA results lacks any internal references and rather is a repetition of the results. Please add references and elaborate this part.

The English usage is sometimes very weak, making the text very hard to understand, please check and improve it.

 

Detailed comments:

line 23: soil nutrients have the following sequence: OMT system > OT system > MT system > CK. – please reword. It is misleading as we don’t know what the sequence is based on.

line 38: decrease what of beneficial bacteria – please reword

line 58: undefined abbreviation. At the same time, I suggest to use the same abbreviation throughout the whole MS, ie. SOM for soil organic matter instead of using soil OM and SOM parallel.

line 83: average temperature: is it a range or a mean value? The text says the former, but the maximum value is missing.

line 87: from the depth

The caption of Figure 2 should be simplified. Remove „presented in a column chart” as it is obvious here.

line 173: „These  ten  kinds  of  relative  abundance..” please reword. Here you might want to say, that the ten most abundant classes. Also, the naming of the classes is sometimes odd, like undefined_actinobacteria. This can be a good naming for the draft, but for the final version these should be named more clearly.

line 174: reword here and later on: the top ten proportion

line 210: You mean axes here? This mistake is a systematic one, please correct it.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The study compares the changes of soil nutrients and soil bacterial community in the long-term tea plantation under different agroforestry intercropping systems.

This paper could be of interest to the scientific community but I cannot recommend it for publication in the present form.
The manuscript presents a discrete amount of analytical data which are unfortunately not clearly represented and described. The aims, experimental plan, samplings, figures, statistical analysis,  the description of the results are confusing, and the results should be discussed better.

In addition, I highly recommend that the authors engage a native English-speaking technical editorial service or professional colleague to assist them with language editing.

Furthermore, despite the aims declared in the paper, the focus is mainly on bacterial community changes in samples. The “Introduction” is repetitive and too general. Why is this work interesting? What is new? The keywords are repetitive, many words are already in the title. The Authors should be clearer in reporting the number of plots and treatments and describe individual treatments in more detail. Few details are also given in the methods. For example, how is TOC determined? With Kjeldahl method? The Authors should clarify how many samples there are for each treatment and how many replicates there are for each sample.

The statistical analyses used and the data processing are not well explained or justified. Why do the Authors use CCA and Spearman correlations?

The result described in line 138 does not correspond to what can be seen in Figure 1. The Authors should clarify what is written in lines 209-210. I would not separate figures and tables in section 3.5. There are two figures 2. In the “discussion” there is a repetition of the results and a simple comparison with other studies.

The Authors should be more critical and try to give explanations.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I thank the authors for improving the manuscript by following the instructions and comments.

The manuscript should be accepted for publication in the present version.