Soil Organic Carbon Stock Prediction: Fate under 2050 Climate Scenarios, the Case of Eastern Ethiopia

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Topic is important and authors have tried to present in better form. Methodology is appropriate but the English is need to be improved.

I have mentioned some minor mistake.

Abstract need to rewrite to create better impact.

Introduction is well but it contains more part of literature review. 

Line 47-49 (This maintains soil ecosystem services to enhance sustainable agriculture, hence sustainable development) Sentence is not clear.

Line 69-71 (Although projections for rainfall are less certain than projections for temperature, higher annual rainfall is also expected in eastern Africa) Explain the reason?

Is there any specific criteria to select location for soil samples?

Line 269-270 (A study conducted in East Africa showed that SOC is strongly affected by soil inherent properties such as soil texture and soil type) suggested to place these lines in Introduction instead of methodology.

Re-arrange all the figures. Figure numbers are repeated and incorrect. 

Conclusion part is missing

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Soil Organic Carbon Stock Prediction: Fate under 2050 Climate Scenarios, the case of West Hararghe, Oromia Regional State, Eastern Ethiopia

This paper is well-written but requires some minor improvements, which are mentioned below:

1.     Suggested to make a Flowchart of the proposed method to explain readers easily about the process. If it is Figure 1, it should be updated more clearly.

 

2.       Main contributions of the paper should be mentioned in the Introduction section.

 

3. Please make the Related Work section separately with recently published event detection approaches (papers) such as traditional Image processing/Computer Vision, Machine/Deep Learning and other famous approaches.

 

4.       Please increase the number of Related work references with recently published object detection and recognition papers such as https://doi.org/10.3390/s22249784.

 

5.    Any way to reduce the computational cost compared to other approaches, please discuss.

 

6.     More information is required about the method followed in the so-called subjective evaluation. I mean about the procedure and environment (the information provided to the subjects.

 

7.     Achieved results caused by overfitting? Please discuss this in the experiment section.

 

8.       Conclusion part is needed to be written with the major findings of this article. The current format looks included in the Discussion section but it should be separated.

 

9.       The authors mentioned some limitations of the proposed method but not mentioned future research directions on how to fix that challenge.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Reviewer

MDPI – Sustainability

Manuscript Number: sustainability-2273718

Title: «Soil Organic Carbon Stock Prediction: Fate under 2050 Climate Scenarios, the case of West Hararghe, Oromia Regional State, Eastern Ethiopia».

line 24 Sentences should not start with a numeral.

line 162 In figure 1, the image is not visible. What do the letters "a" and "b" in the title of the picture mean?

line 209 and 212 no reference to formula 3 and 4.

line 327 Equation numbering should continue from page 5 and begin as Equation 5, 6 onwards.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The paper provides an interesting report on the prediction of the soil organic carbon for several characteristic regions of Ethiopia. The data are reliable and can be used in similar studies. The paper can be published upon resolving the following questions and queries:

Figure 1: some text is missing, a and b parts are not in the figure.

Equations are formatted not according to the template.

the RCP abbreviation for Representative Concentration Pathways should be added to the main text, not only to the abstract.

Figure names in the main text and in the abstract are not correct

Map figures are not thoroughly discussed in the text, their summaries in tables are discussed instead. In my opinion, these figures can be moved to Appendices or Supplementary.

The aim stated in the Introduction is too generic and seems to be applicable to any conditions and regions, but in fact, the main body of the paper shows a specific region to be used in the prediction. To a lesser extent, is generic character is in the Discussion and Conclusions section, which is rather incorrect. I suggest correcting the aim, the discission, and concluding remarks to shew the specific and regional character of the study.

The number of significant digits should be checked and corrected throughout the text: in my opinion, the uncertainty of the surveyed value is too large to predict values with the stated number of significant digits.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Author has addressed all the suggestions very well.

I have no objection to recommend this article for acceptance

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have improved the quality and presentation. The manuscript is now acceptable.

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors corrected the text and ttok into account all my concerns.