Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript titled "Extended assessment of sprinkler irrigation uniformity in greenhouses using GIS and hydraulic modeling” investigated to simulate the water application results of all the emitters of an irrigation installation using QGIS and EPANET. The study showed that the methodology proposed could be very useful to improve the management of sprinkler irrigation systems.

The ms fully falls within the editorial purposes of the journal and is focused on a very current issue, albeit extensively investigated in the literature. The ms is well structured and contains a large amount of very interesting and convincing data but an adequate review appears necessary before publication. I list some comments and suggestions for improvements below:

1-  Line 11-16: It is preferable to suffice with one sentence to define the problem in “Abstract”.

2- The “Abstract” should be paraphrased, citing some result data.

3- The keywords must not be repeated in the title.

4- Paragraphs from the introduction part consider the methodology of the research work (Line 108-123).

5- The objective are not clear and need to be significantly improved.

6- Figure 2 is unclear.

7- Graph 1:1 is preferred to compare the measured values with the modeled values, showing the regression equations and clarifying their coefficients (intercept and slop), besides the determination coefficient (R²).

8- To assess the performance of the proposed method several measures of accuracy must be applied, as there is not a unique and more suitable performance evaluation test. It is advisable to use the R2, MAE, and RMSE as measures of variances. I suggest calculating to these accuracy measures to compare the estimations with other works.

9- The amount of results reported is impressive but their critical lacks references.

10- The results of this study should be compared with previous studies, and this should be stated in the “discussion” section.

11- Avoid to used “we” or “will” throughout the text.

12- The conclusions of the work are not found. "Conclusions" section is not just a repetition of the results and should be limited to considerations that are very important in your study.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the effort you have made in reviewing the article. Your comments have been very helpful in improving the manuscript. Here I attach the word with the responses to your comments. 
Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript can be accepted for publication after major revisions, see the followings:

*The introduction should be improved (The literature review is not good).
*English should be improved.
*The Abstract and Conclusion should be improved. Outstanding results should be defined as quantified in the abstract and conclusions.
*The References should be updated.

*The novelty of this article is not clear. Please more explain it.
*Better description and explanation of figures 4 to 6. The description of the results of the figures is not sufficient and convincing.
*There are some typing errors and inaccuracies in the manuscript. Please, check the paper again for any possible misprints.

*The quality of figures should be improved.

* How has the validity of the results been examined? Please mention in the text of the full article.
* Introduction part needs to be extended by some of the recently published papers to show the importance of geographic information systems (GIS) in good journals. The following references should be included in this manuscript:

[1] Gholami, V., A. Asghari, and E. Taghvaye Salimi. "Flood hazard zoning using geographic information system (GIS) and HEC-RAS model (Case study: Rasht City)." Caspian Journal of Environmental Sciences 14, no. 3 (2016): 263-272.

[2] Alemi Safaval, P., M. Kheirkhah Zarkesh, S. A. Neshaei, and F. Ejlali. "Morphological changes in the southern coasts of the Caspian Sea using remote sensing and GIS." Caspian Journal of Environmental Sciences 16, no. 3 (2018): 271-285.

*I hope that the authors refer to more published papers in Sustainability.

Author Response

Thank you very much for the effort you have made in reviewing the article. Your comments have been very helpful in improving the manuscript. Here I attach the word with the responses to your comments. 
Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The article has conceptual errors in the method used to obtain the data to be compared with simulated data. The authors demonstrate a lack of knowledge of irrigation systems by confusing the use of formulae, in particular by using the flow-pressure relationship of an emitter to determine the characteristic curve of a sprinkler. Spatialisation of the curve data, i.e. an exact measurement of the rainfall pattern on the ground at different sprinkler operating pressures, was instead necessary in order to proceed with the comparison between measured and simulated data.

I recommend taking new measurements and with the new data make evaluations on the proposed method.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you very much for the effort you have made in reviewing the article. Your comments have been very helpful in improving the manuscript. Here I attach the word with the responses to your comments. 
Best regards

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The manuscript presents novel idea of evaluating irrigation uniformity under sprinkler systems.

However, I would like the following concerns addressed 

1) The keywords should not repeat words in the title for better indexing 

2) Line 191 and line 112, correct EP-ANET to EPANET 

3) Give a small overview on EPANET as an hydraulic model and why this particular model 

4) Explain the significance of the coefficients in Eq 3 and Table 1

5) Improve the discussion section. It is too shallow 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 5 Report

The manuscript entitled " Extended assessment of sprinkler irrigation uniformity in 2 greenhouses using GIS and hydraulic modeling" has been reviewed. This paper aims to use QGIS and EPANET together to geospatially represent rainfall and calculate distribution uniformity in a system with a pressure-dependent demand. The subject of the manuscript is very interesting, it is well written and contains important results. Some general and minor comments are provided below.

 -The quality of all of the figures in the manuscript should be improved.

 -A legend should be added to the Figure 4b.

 -Table2: what are kd and xd? Please define in the text. Also, what does the negative or zero values of xd in Table 2 mean? Please discuss in more detail in the discussion section.

 -Line 140: the authors have said that “In each trial, 24 rain gauges were placed at a frame of 0.5 x 1 m, covering an area of 7 m2 (Figure 2).”  Usually, simple cans are used for pressurized irrigation system uniformity evaluation. What kind of rain gauge is used in this study? Do you mean the cans or a special instrument?

 -An error analysis should be provided to evaluate the accuracy of the measurements.

 -While the authors have approved that there are some similar (but not identical) studies in the literature, no comparison is provided by the authors in the discussion section.

-Conclusion: The conclusion typically aims to summarize the study's results and discuss its limitations. Every study has its limitations, which the authors should state plainly without hesitation. The limitations of the study should be made evident at the end of the conclusion section since this study is not an exception.

 Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

In my point of view in this research, the researcher has done a good job. Finally, I recommend accepting this research for publication in ‘’Sustainability’.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This article can be accepted.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

I maintain my perplexity about the way of measuring and processing data, or more specifically as stated in section 2.3. There is confusion in the formulas used. You want to construct a precipitation characteristic curve using the flow rate (L/h) instead of application rate (mm/h). The flow-pressure relationship formula indicates the amount of water discharged from the nozzle in the unit of time, another thing is how this is distributed over the surface. I do not understand how you calculate this distribution. Which works do you refer to use this procedure? Please cite references. On the other hand, Figure 4(a) shows a rather anomalous distribution. What are those "hills"? What is meant by sector? What are its dimensions (length and width)? Where are the sprinklers positioned? There is a lot of confusion...

Above all, you use an empirical formula specific to each nozzle whose flow exponent x must vary between 0 and 1 (from self-compensating nozzles to laminar flow nozzles) and which, I repeat, cannot be used to simulate the distribution of water on the ground. 

The spatial distribution in figure 4a and also what is shown in figure 5 are proof of this for me. Especially in figure 4a, the distribution has a pattern reminiscent of the rainfall distribution of many sprinklers when in the text it appears that there are only two rows of sprinklers within the greenhouse. It is also unclear whether each greenhouse is a sector. However, figure 4a is unclear, at least to me, as the length and width of the sector is missing.

I do not doubt that the applied model is interesting, but at the moment a wrong comparison is made with dubious measured data, which therefore invalidates the final result. 

In my opinion, the whole process needs to be revised.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

I am satisfied with the improvements in the manuscript

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

No Comments and Suggestions