Repurposing Dredged Canal Sediment for Topsoil at Bowling, Scotland

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The idea is good, but it is not well written, poor introduction, confusion between methodology and results, there is no experimental design therefore, its results are not well justified.

It would be necessary to include in the introduction how is the use of plants for the drying and stabilization of sludge carried out? a brief description of the process and examples.

If the history of the drying container seems important to you, it should be briefly commented in the introduction and in the methodology include a clear description of it, as well as improve figure 3 (the drawing is not understandable, the symbols must be made legible).

Table 2 is not detailed, there not significance of acronyms, that represent average values that it is not known where they were obtained from.

There is no experimental design, the variables to be measured are missing, how were the treatments applied? There is no diagram of their application and sampling; How were the data reviewed and analyzed? Nor any statistical model used to validate differences.

Methodology is confused with results, please review..., "selecting the right grass" is a result, where that its application and selection method must be described in methodology.

lines 238 and 239, refers to the sampling of plants, but does not state that how the samples were reviewed...

It would be necessary to include some other references on the subject.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript presents an excellent study of the reuse of sediment by evaluating the environmental impact. I have few comments and I suggest accepting it for publication after minor revision.

Please find bellow my comments

Line 135: The authors need to improve the resolution of the Figure 3

Line 136: The authors need to give more information about the samples collected: number of samples, depth of sampling and method of sampling.

Line 136 -147: The authors could present the data of this section in Table.

Line 189: The authors need to give more information about the experimental design of the plots.

the authors need to add section of Conclusions

Moderate editing of English language

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper deals with and interesting and relevant topic that is of significance in sustainable management of waterways and open spaces or greenbelts in urban settings. It is well-written and organized. A couple of points of clarification are indicated below:

On page 4, bottom paragraph:  ". . . . total organic carbon content of c. 12% . . . ". Why is "c." included here?

On Page 9, second paragraph, you say: "Plots that were not fertilized appeared to have denser growth that the fertilized plots, on the north side of the cycle way". Does this suggest that there is no real need for fertilizing?

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The work improved enough to be published, congratulation