Adaptive Grain Yield Patterns of Triticale (×Triticosecale Wittmack) Cultivars in Six Regions of Poland

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

no further comments

Author Response

Thank You so much

Reviewer 2 Report

Table 1: The values into the columns are not mean values but ranges. Moreover, it is not clear how these values have been obtained. Are they the minimum and maximum value recorded within the region? Do they refer to the 5-year period of the study or to a multi-year period? Please, clarify. Additionally, unit of measurement are lacking. Finally, consider that mean yield should be followed by standard error and should be showed for both MIM and HIM.

Table 2: It would be more interesting to see the soil fertility class of each location rather than the arrangement of soil fertility within the Region. Where this percent distribution come from? Is it the result of the analysis of each location or an overall assessment of the region? Please, clarify.

Moreover, it is not clear from the text which is the criterion for that country subdivision: geographic? administrative? climatic? or other else? Please, specify.

Lines 92-94: Foliar fertilizer applied as well as fungicides and growth regulators should be specified.

Lines 148-149: It seems to me that this large difference between MIM and HIM for the effect of Region is a very interesting result, but the authors did not discuss it adequately. Please, try to improve this aspect.

Line 150: Please, be consistent between comma and point (10.30 and 12,52).

Figure 4: Generally, line graph is used when showing a trend; in this case, a column or radar chart would be more appropriate.

Line 254: If you say: “Numerous studies”, you are expected to cite more than one study. Please add some citation, also for other winter cereals, in which environment (year or location) had a significant effect on grain yield. Here just some suggestions: for winter wheat (Barraclough, P.B.; Howarth, J.R.; Jones, J.; Lopez-Bellido, R.; Parmar, S.; Shepherd, C.E.; Hawkesford, M.J. Nitrogen efficiency of wheat: Genotypic and environmental variation and prospects for improvement. Eur. J. Agron. 2010, 33, 1–11); for durum wheat (Rossini, F.; Provenzano, M.E.; Sestili, F.; Ruggeri, R. Synergistic Effect of Sulfur and Nitrogen in the Organic and Mineral Fertilization of Durum Wheat: Grain Yield and Quality Traits in the Mediterranean Environment. Agronomy 2018, 8, 189); for oat (F. Martinez, H.M. Arelovich, L.N. Wehrhahne. Grain yield, nutrient content and lipid profile of oat genotypes grown in a semiarid environment. Field Crops Research, Volume 116, Issues 1–2, 2010, Pages 92-100).

Line 266: This was probably due to an incorrect aggregation of locations within a region. Again, it is not clear on which basis Poland was subdivided in those Regions and 58 locations were assigned to that Regions.

Reference section: Please check all references because I found an incorrect connection between reference [11] into the text and into the reference section. Into the text, it refers to durum wheat, while into the reference section it refers to winter rye. The reference on durum wheat is [10] in reference section. Probably, the reference section was all shifted.

Author Response

We would like to include some explanation behind this study and our response to the latest reviews:

Table 1: The values into the columns are not mean values but ranges. Moreover, it is not clear how these values have been obtained. Are they the minimum and maximum value recorded within the region? Do they refer to the 5-year period of the study or to a multi-year period? Please, clarify. Additionally, unit of measurement are lacking. Finally, consider that mean yield should be followed by standard error and should be showed for both MIM and HIM.

Response:

The table description has been corrected. The table presents the ranges of long-term averages at meteorological stations in a given region. These data came from the official government network. A standard error has been added.

Table 2: It would be more interesting to see the soil fertility class of each location rather than the arrangement of soil fertility within the Region. Where this percent distribution come from? Is it the result of the analysis of each location or an overall assessment of the region? Please, clarify.

Moreover, it is not clear from the text which is the criterion for that country subdivision: geographic? administrative? climatic? or other else? Please, specify.

Response:

It would be very interesting to provide such information, however, providing such information for 58 locations would be very inconvenient and might be confusing. The percentage share comes from the Polish Central Statistical Office - this information has been added to the description of the tables. This is an overall rating from the region. The cities are selected in such a way as to represent the climate and soil conditions of the region, which has been confirmed in our earlier works:

• Derejko A., Studnicki M., Mądry W., Gacek E.: A comparison of winter wheat cultivar rankings in groups of Polish locations, w: Cereal Research Communications, vol. 44, nr 4, 2016, ss. 628-638,
• Studnicki M., Lenartowicz T., Noras K. Wójcik-Gront E., Wyszyński Z. Assessment of stability and adaptation patterns of white sugar yield from sugar beet cultivars in temperate climate environments, w: Agronomy, vol. 9, nr 405, 2019, ss. 2-11,

The division into regions is based on the climate and soil conditions of Poland. However, the borders are based on the administrative structure of Poland. For ease of use, regional boundaries are interpolated into administrative divisions. Text with description has been added to the work

Lines 92-94: Foliar fertilizer applied as well as fungicides and growth regulators should be specified.

Response: Information has been added to the text.

Lines 148-149: It seems to me that this large difference between MIM and HIM for the effect of Region is a very interesting result, but the authors did not discuss it adequately. Please, try to improve this aspect

Responce: With high-input managements, variance of yields in regions is much smaller than with moderate-input levels. This may be due to the fact that high-input levels create optimal conditions for triticale growth, which allows varieties to demonstrate their genetic potential fully. We know that modern varieties are very little diversified in terms of yield, i.e. modern cultivars  achieve a similar yield. However, with modern-input managements, i.e. less optimal conditions, the genetic diversity of cultivars is more noticeable. In the literature, it can often be seen that with high-volume management or in optimal soil and climate conditions, the varieties are less diverse in terms of yield:

• Hammer G.L., McLean G., Chapman S., Zheng B., Doherty A., Harrison M., van Oosterom E., Jordan D. Crop design for specific adaptation in variable dryland production environments. Crop & Pasture Sci. 2014, 65, 614-626.
• Milgate A., Ovenden B., Adorada D., Lisle Ch., Lacy J., Coombes N. Genetic improvement of triticale for irrigated systems in south-eastern Australia: a study of genotype and genotype × environment interactions. Crop and Pasture Sci. 2015, 66(8), 782-792
• Kahram A., Khodarahmi M., Mohammadi A., Bihamta M., Ahmadi G.H., Ghandi A., Jafarby J.A., Taherian M., Abdi H. Genotype× environment interaction analysis for grain yield of durum wheat new genotypes in the moderate region of Iran using AMMI model. World J. Agr. Sci. 2013, 9(3), 298-304
• Studnicki M. Derejko A., Wójcik-Gront E., Kosma M. Adaptation patterns of winter wheat cultivars in agro-ecological regions. Sci. Agric. 2019, 76, 148-156.

Line 150: Please, be consistent between comma and point (10.30 and 12,52).

Response: It has been corrected.

Figure 4: Generally, line graph is used when showing a trend; in this case, a column or radar chart would be more appropriate.

Response: We changed the figure 4 to a radar chart.

Line 254: If you say: “Numerous studies”, you are expected to cite more than one study. Please add some citation, also for other winter cereals, in which environment (year or location) had a significant effect on grain yield. Here just some suggestions: for winter wheat (Barraclough, P.B.; Howarth, J.R.; Jones, J.; Lopez-Bellido, R.; Parmar, S.; Shepherd, C.E.; Hawkesford, M.J. Nitrogen efficiency of wheat: Genotypic and environmental variation and prospects for improvement. Eur. J. Agron. 2010, 33, 1–11); for durum wheat (Rossini, F.; Provenzano, M.E.; Sestili, F.; Ruggeri, R. Synergistic Effect of Sulfur and Nitrogen in the Organic and Mineral Fertilization of Durum Wheat: Grain Yield and Quality Traits in the Mediterranean Environment. Agronomy 2018, 8, 189); for oat (F. Martinez, H.M. Arelovich, L.N. Wehrhahne. Grain yield, nutrient content and lipid profile of oat genotypes grown in a semiarid environment. Field Crops Research, Volume 116, Issues 1–2, 2010, Pages 92-100).

Response: Thank you very much for the hint. We've cited and added the work to References.

Line 266: This was probably due to an incorrect aggregation of locations within a region. Again, it is not clear on which basis Poland was subdivided in those Regions and 58 locations were assigned to that Regions.

Response: We've added a more detailed description of the division into regions in response to the previous comment. Rather, we would not suspect the wrong selection of places representing regions, because for other cereal species these places well represented the conditions in the regions. Therefore, we suspect that this may be a specific reaction of the species.

We would like to thank Reviewer 2 for an in-depth and very helpful review. Thanks to the Reviewer's comments, the work is much better and can be used more by scientists in the world

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Revisions are considerable.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

no further comments

Reviewer 2 Report

Adaptive patterns of grain yield of triticale cultivars in Polish agro-ecological regions

I have appreciated the effort made by the authors to improve the manuscript. Despite this, I regret that they did not take into account some previous remarks. In particular, following precisions are always missing regarding the topic of this paper (it should be remembered that the two following points were included in my previous report) :

First point : The term “agro ecological” used to describe the different regions does not seem to me suitable since these regions have been defined on other consideration than those based on culture management or some climatic data.

The variability intra region is important within the regions 2, 3, 5 et 6 suggesting that varietal recommendation based on region considerations will not be efficient. The pedoclimatic description of the six regions remains very poor in the paper using with subjective and very vague considerations (table 1) not understandable for non-specialist of the Poland. I am not comfortable with this point since the title of the paper mentioned ‘agro ecological regions’ is cited. Obviously the reader is wondering: What does it mean mild/strict winter or summer? What about the water resource since the amount of rain is given per year and not for the triticale cycle What are good/ poor / average soils?

To clarify what are the different agro ecological regions in Poland, we need a clear, objective and deep description of each of them based on climate and soil data, following by a clustering analysis helping us to precise the number of different regions and to describe properly each of them.

It seems to me that this work would be more interesting if the analysis will be carry out at the location scale.

Second point: similar remark are address for the cultivation conditions: MIM and HIM crop management are not well defined (for example, authors have to clarify N fertilization: if X is the optimal N dose for un given site how do they describe N treatments in HIM and MIM for this site ?  

If we consider the details of the text:

A graph summarizing yield performances for each site (based on box plots for ex., ) could be helpful to illustrate yield variability within and between sites. Figure 2: number are really difficult to read. Please change the letter font Something is wrong in the figure2: in the caption authors said that MIM data are on the upper triangle and HIM data in the lower one’s. In the related comments (bottom of page 4), they are speaking of a correlation (r=0.96) between regions 1 and 2 for HIM. According to the caption this correlation was found for MIM crop management. Please check this point. Figure 2: please check all the numbers (ex : r= -0.08 in the figure and -0.07 in the text , r=0.99 in the text and 0.9 in the figure …. ) Figure 4: Fig 4a and 4b are exactly the same !! this is not expected Correlations: We have no information related to the related pvalues. Why? Comments of the figure 4 and table 3: I am not agree with the authors: yes, genotype performances in regions 5 and 6 are different from the others, generating G*E interactions but as the genotype ranking within these regions are so different (Figure 3), it is difficult to conclude and to recommend one genotype except if few number of lines overperformed in each site of each of these regions; is it the case ? Table 3, I wonder why the authors did not consider Trismart and Algoso performances which are closed to Sorento and Pizarro. Cultivar ranking variability within a given region: I would expect more discussion on the consequences of this variability; how to interpret this variability and which consequences on cultivar recommendations: I think that within these regions, is it possible to identify sub-regions maintaining genotype ranking; In this case cultivar recommendations should be addressed at another geographical scale … Authors could be develop this point in the results (especially for the regions 2, 3, 5, 6) partitioning them in subregions with stable genotype ranking.

In conclusion, I cannot accept this paper for publication: its redaction has to be still improved, to be more precise, more informative and to propose more innovative results. At this stage it does not contain a sufficient information to represent an interest for the international community.