Analyzing Various Factors Affecting Farmers’ Willingness to Adopt Soil Erosion Control Measures in the Sebeya Catchment, Rwanda

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research question posed, rationale for the study, methodology, and empirical analysis are all worthy of publication. Unfortunately, in terms of grammar and presentation style, I have to recommend major revisions before this manuscript can be considered for publication. I recommend the authors hire or otherwise request a professional editor to help them revise the manuscript to improve its readability and clarity. 

Author Response

Thank you, Dear Reviewer, for your important comments and suggestions about improving this manuscript's grammar and presentation style.

Kindly find here attached our responses to your highlighted comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This study shed light to analyze farmers’ perceptions on the actual status and future perspectives in improving, adoption and implementing Soil Erosion Control (SEC) measures in Sebeya catchment located in the Western Province of Rwanda. The debated issue is interesting, and discussions well exposed, nevertheless the following comments should be considered before publication.

-      Innovation should be better evidenced, what is the greatest contribution of this research to the state of the art of the theme? The authors should add the contribution of this study in the second last paragraph of the introduction part.

-      There was lack of justifications in section 4, Discussion related to variables (adopted factors) on how the authors decided to use these factors such as the age of farmer, gender of farmer and education etc. The following references can be referred for such a discussion:

  §   Ahmad, M.; Tang, X.-W.; Qiu, J.-N.; Ahmad, F. Interpretive Structural Modeling and MICMAC Analysis for Identifying and Benchmarking Significant Factors of Seismic Soil Liquefaction. Appl. Sci. 2019, 9, 233.

  §   Ahmad, M., Amjad, M., Al-Mansob, R.A., Kamiński, P., Olczak, P., Khan, B.J. and Alguno, A.C., 2022. Prediction of Liquefaction-Induced Lateral Displacements Using Gaussian Process Regression. Applied Sciences, 12(4), p.1977.

-      Results missed the debate and explanation of the engineering point of view, Please highlight.

-      Please communicate the future research. The lessons learned must be further elaborated in the conclusion by discussing the results to the community and the future impacts. What is your perspective on future research?

-      The manuscript (introduction, methods and results sections) could be substantially improved by relying and citing more literature.

Author Response

Thank you, Dear Reviewer, for your important comments and suggestions to improve our manuscript.

Kindly find here attached our responses to your highlighted comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

In this study the authors have evaluated the various socio-economic factors that affect the decisions of the farmers to adopt soil erosion control measures. Various statistical analyses have been conducted to arrive at the most critical correlations that impact the willingness to adopt. Below are a few suggestions that can improve the manuscript:

1.       Line 19 and 283: The word should be “ discussion”.

2.       Line 195: “Irish” instead of irish

3.       Line 198: Double space between potatoes and beans

4.       Line 34, 194, 199, 202, 206, : Space issue between words

5.  The figures and tables need to be properly aligned for better formatting

6.       Line 222: colon/ hyphen missing after erosion

7.       Font size not consistent throughout the manuscript (eg: Line 233 to 236)

8.       Line 241 and 248: “The” not needed

9.     Line 294: Table 6 heading does not convey any information of the data that the table provides. Better caption needed

10.   Proper superscripts needed (Eg: line 286, 289, Table 6, and others)

11.   Lines 327, 341, 373, 383, 405, 421, 438, 447, 457: these sub-headings need proper formatting

12.   Lines 517, 521: proper formatting needed

13.  Please include some numbers and percentages for a comparative analysis against the relevant results that are already known in literature.

14.   References need to be properly formatted

15.   In the discussion section, reviewer believes there is a lack of answer to the question ‘why this trend’. A more in-depth analysis will benefit the manuscript.

16.   The overall grammar of the manuscript can be improved. 

Author Response

Thank you, Dear Reviewer, for your important comments and suggestions to improve our manuscript.

Kindly find here attached our responses to your highlighted comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper still needs extensive revisions to improve use of English grammar, composition, clarity and readability. FYI, we typically do not report statistically "insignificant results" especially in an abstract. You have done the hard work of collecting data, analyzing data, and reporting the results. I urge you to go one step farther and find someone to help you correct simple mistakes that researchers make when English is a second language and/or science writing is a developing skill.  Suggested revisions to the abstract alone are as follows. 

Soil erosion is a worldwide environmental problem leading to the low agricultural productivity and deterioration of the water quality degradation. Improving soil erosion control measures is essential. of extreme necessity. This study reports the results of a survey of 75 farmers, using structured interviews, field observations, and focus groups, to analyze farmers' perceptions concerning current and future efforts the actual status and future perspectives in improving, adopting, and implementing Soil Erosion Control (SEC) measures in Sebeya catchment located in the Western Province of Rwanda., this study is based on a detailed survey of 75 farmers using structured interviews, field observations and focus group discussions. Various factors influencing farmers' perceptions of soil erosion causes, effects, and willingness to adopt SEC measures were analyzed using descriptive statistics implemented in  and SPSS (Version 20), including the t-tests, the chi-square tests, and the a binary logistic regression model. Using the  Chi-square test results indicate that on 8 explanatory variables, gender, age age of a farmer, land ownership, farmland size, access to social media, and access to credit were found to be the remarkable influential factors strongly associated (p < 0.05) with adoption of SEC measures while marital status and education were not. The A binary logistic regression model showed that among farmers' socio-economic characteristics of farmers, farming experience (B = 0.749; p = 0.020) and access to socio media (B = 2.107; p = 0.027) were positively correlated while age (B = - 0.642; p = 0.035) and gender (B = - 2.034; p = 0.032) were negatively correlated (p < 0.05) degree of significance level with the adoption of SEC measures. In order to mitigate the high rates soil erosion rates and improve increase food production, this research recommends the that government and non-governmental organizations to be involved engage farmers, including providing technical assistance,  to assist farmers in adopting SEC measures in Sebeya catchment.

Author Response

Thank you, Dear Reviewer, for your important comments and suggestions about improving this manuscript's grammar and presentation style.

To enrich and enhance the article's readability and clarity, kindly find our Final Revised Manuscript (Version 2). We wish to acknowledge our native English-speaking colleague who sacrificed his time to check and correct our mistakes which were persistent in our revised manuscript (version 1).

Author Response File: Author Response.DOC

Reviewer 2 Report

Most of the comments are addressed 

Author Response

Thank you, Dear Reviewer, for your important comments and suggestions about improving this manuscript's grammar and presentation style.

To enrich and enhance the article's readability and clarity, kindly find our Final Revised Manuscript (Version 2). We wish to acknowledge our native English-speaking colleague who sacrificed his time to check and correct our mistakes which were persistent in our revised manuscript (version 1). 

Author Response File: Author Response.DOC

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors must make additional efforts to improve English grammar. Using their abstract, I provided an example of necessary revisions. Several mistakes remain, including overuse of articles, missing article, and missing verb. Clearly, English is a second language and the authors must take additional steps to correct basic but repetitive grammatical errors. If you want to provide a copy of the manuscript in WORD, I will review and suggest edits. However, it should be noted, that if I were to submit manuscripts in such condition, they would be rejected up front.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, kindly find our Revised Manuscript (Version 3). Thank you, for your important comments and suggestions about improving this manuscript's grammar and presentation style.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx