At Which Spatial Scale Does Crop Diversity Enhance Natural Enemy Populations and Pest Control? An Experiment in a Mosaic Cropping System
, Eva Thomine 1, Adrien Rusch 4, Anne-Violette Lavoir 1, Chunli Xiu 5, Di Ning 3, Yanhui Lu 5, Su Wang 3 and Nicolas Desneux 1,2,5,*
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The manuscript used a two-year successive field experiment to explore the influence of crop diversity on pests and natural enemies’ abundance and spillover. It’s no doubt that behind the manuscript were the experiment and harvest conducted and the huge database analyzed. The following are my understanding and comments on the manuscript.
Firstly, the manuscript came up with three questions and the subsequent experiments were designed for them. However, most of the result showed no detected impact or correlation which is due to the small spatial scale and the bare soil between plots that researchers set. But the results found that placing maize crops in proximity to other types of crops might enhance the early presence of ladybird in adjacent crops, which is an interesting clue for further research.
Overall, due to the complexity of the arthropod abundance and movements in different scale of fields, the manuscript got little significant result to answer the questions above, but the practice of the manuscript gave new insight and experience to late-comers.
Some advices and errors were marked in the PDFs, including:
agronomy-1847115-peer-review-v1
agronomy-1847115-supplementary
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you for your appreciation of our research, and for your comments, which we have addressed one by one below.
Minor comments:
1. please keep italic
ANSWER: DONE. Thank you for this comment, we changed throughout the text.
2. "but see" to express what?
ANSWER: This has been clarified L65.
3. But the Figure S2 shows the sampling time begin in 20 th June, 2017
ANSWER: That is correct, sorry about this typo. We have now corrected L160.
4. How long have the pitfall trap functioned in your sample day?
ANSWER: Apologies about the missing information. This has now been added L164.
5. please keep the label at the same level
ANSWER: DONE. We modified and replaced Fig. 1 in the text.
6. please mark the different color's label.
ANSWER: DONE. We modified the legend of Fig. 3 to reflect that.
7. delete the "an"
ANSWER: Sorry for the typo. We replaced with “at”.
8. what kind of alternative food were accessible in the field? please give some examples, thus some ladybirds are polyphagous.
ANSWER: This has been added L453-454.
9. “aphid eggs” can’t understand.
ANSWER: This has been clarified L461-462.
Reviewer 2 Report
The MS is well structured, and is of high quality.
Author Response
Thank you for your appreciation of our research.
Reviewer 3 Report
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Thank you for your appreciation of our research, and for your comment. We have modified the manuscript to add a conclusion, and specified the focus of our study on northern China, as suggested.
