Biochar-Compost Interactions as Affected by Weathering: Effects on Biological Stability and Plant Growth

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Following are the comments and suggestions for the authors to improve the quality of the manuscript:

Introduction:

Line 36-40, the authors stated ......dangerous climate change. Again, .... few negative effects of land use, water use and energy requirement. What is the use of biochar if it has negative effects on our environmental sustainability?

Line 48-49, reference Liu et al., 2015 need to be formatted.

The authors have provided sufficient background information; however, it lacks coherent. The authors must work on logical flow and simplify the sentence structure.

Materials and methods:

The authors have divided methodology component into several subheadings, which improved the quality of the presentation, and clarity to the audiences.

Line 97-104, please maintain the logical flow of the detail process.

Rest part of the methodology parts were clearly and well presented.

Results

Line 227-231, the authors stated the material lost was 15 mg g^-1 for maize, which seems less from figure 1.  Please state it correctly. The authors did not mention whether each of the treatment groups were significantly different from others. Please use superscript letter to represent the mean (different letters if they are significantly different, and same letter for non-significant values).  Please pay attention for the sentence structure, coherent, and typographical errors.

Discussion

Line 462-474, the authors did not compare and contrast their findings with the relevant literature. Please provide some comparison on the topic, effect of weathered amendment on ryegrass growth.

Overall, presentation is good. Still, it lacks coherent, and contains typographical errors. Please correct them

Thank you. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer 1,

Thank you very much for your review on our manuscript. It helped us a lot to improve it! We considered all your comments and revised the manuscript accordingly.

Please see the attachment for our response to your comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I found the study  interesting and as the methodology shows, a lot of modern procedures had to be undertaken to obtain these results. Pot study included treatments on Haplic Luvisol and Cambisols, that are common soil types (at least in Europe) which gives the work another potential to be cited in the future studies.

The readability of English in the manuscript is excellent and generally the text is easy to follow. However, the clarity of the study is a bit affected by presence of 3 partially different sets of treatments because of individual studies on amendments response to physical weathering, incubation experiment and pot experiment, all conducted with differing duration. I personally was also curious about the results on the effect of fresh and weathered biochar application alone on ryegrass growth, however, if I understood correctly, only biochar mixtures as treatments (not biochars alone) were considered in this pot study.

However, there are some limitations in the few specific areas, which should be considered by the co-authors team. You will find the detailed comments in the attachment.

Best wishes

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

Thank you very much for your review on our manuscript. It helped us a lot to improve it ! We addressed all your comments and revised our manuscript accordingly. As a result, it greatly improved. We thank you for your time and effort.

Please see the attachment for our replies to your comments.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Authors,

Thank you for your hardwork and dedication on revising the manuscript. The manuscript has been improved substantially. However, I have few comments on letter grades in the legends (both for tables and figures). Please add same lower case letter represent significant differences among treatments (p<0.05).