Environmental Assessment of Soils and Crops Based on Heavy Metal Risk Analysis in Southeastern China

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The agronomy-2269757 with title Environmental quality assessment of the agricultural production area based on heavy metal risk analysis in soils and crops from a typical economic region in Southeastern China investigates the environmental quality of the agricultural production area in Taizhou City, a typical economic region that along the Yangtze River in Southeast of China. The authors have to revised the ms and significantly improve it before it can be accepted in such high quality journal.

Title can be changed to: Environmental assessment of soils and crops based on heavy metal risk analysis in Southeastern China.

Why authors did not pay attention to As analysis along with what they have measure?

L22-24: Are you sure that Pb was 32.88 mg/kg? it is very high, check please. If it is ture, what was the main reason for that?

L24-26 The average contents of soil Cd and Hg exceeded .. What about the Pb?

L26 The heavy metal pollution in soil and crop! But, you did not talk about any crops or the heavy metals analysis in plant biomass prior this sentence! You wrote only about the soil.

L32 In scientific writing, etc is totally not accepted. Remove it or replace it with other words.

L32-33 Therefore, continuous monitoring and source control of heavy metals, especially for Cd, should .. Ok, but what about Pb? It is 32.88 mg/kg!

L39-41 please cite uncited text:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2019.104647

Why authors decided to take this number of samples, 370,? Why not 400? Or less?

How many samples of soil and how many samples of plants, and which plant species there were? I did not find this information in the abstract nor in the aim at the end of the introduction. Even, I did not find them in the first paragraphs in the material and methods! Oh finally I found the plant species names in L 137 (Wheat and rice). The question now, Is there any other crops grown in this area? I think yes, why the authors decided to work on Wheat and rice?

L140: 50 g soil sample for each, I think it is small although you do not use it in total for analysis. But, I prefer at least authors should collect 500 g and then they can make the analysis from subsamples of this amount.

L147: suddenly, As appeared, I was asking about it in the second comment in this report. As you see, you have to make your ms as a story. So, the readers do not get misunderstood. This means that the authors have to mention As in the abstract as well as crop names.

Please add all Latin names in the first mention with the English name for any plant species.

L218 add more details about SPSS 20.0 such as the company name, city, state, and country of the product. The SPSS is wrong written, the program was sold to another company and has a new name.

Table 1, please recheck the data for Median, same in other tables.

Table 2, please check ** for the values in this table. I am sure there is something wrong there concerning the stars. The number of correlations values are very low, thus, the stars should not be two even nor one star. Check please the values or the stars. Same in other tables.

Discussion in some parts, it is superficial, please revise it.

Add some key results in conclusion please

Good luck

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

The manuscript ID agronomy-2269757, entitled"Environmental quality assessment of the agricultural production area based on heavy metal risk analysis in soils and crops from a typical economic region in Southeastern China" try to explain the provenance and the anthropogenic input for soil and crops of rice and wheat from an developed region.

The manuscript should be carefully revised and the information reorganized; from my point of view a series of observations should be clarified as follows:

- Lines 71, 105, 110, 111-112, 120 must include references;

- Line 108 - add information about the geology background on which the soils are formed; there is the same geological formation?

-section 2.2 Sample collection and analysis - a short description of the total number of soil and the distance between samples should be added as well as for crop samples; from the distribution maps can be concluded that rice and wheat where taken from the same places.

- section 2.2.3. Chemical analysis - can you detail the Hg samples preparation for analysis and analysis? Add reference and describe the digestion of soil and crop samples.

- section 2.3 Data and statistical analysis

Why Pi , Pn was chosen for the present work? in the introduction a wide series of indices were mention. Please detail "under different soil pH conditions", line 165.

I suggest to put all the information together with the formula; explanation of each symbol, the background / safety values and the the classes of pollution category.

What do you think about the transfer factor in the case of crop samples?

-Line 213 - why do you use IDW and not krigging method?

-Line 231- Values of OM, TN, AP, AK are presented at section 2.1 Description of the study area, where are needed references. If you add this data in the table, then you should give all the information about analysis in the section of Methods;

- Line 267 - reference [41], the name should start with capital letter;

-Line 280 - What is CV?

-Line 303 - what S28, S29,S35 means? for this kind of explanation, the samples should be describe before in the section about sampling.

- Line 326- The conclusion about bioavailable content as other studies, can not be made because the chemical analyses do not reveal this!

- Section 3. Results and discussion - the text and tables need to be restructured in a more logical and easier to follow way for readers, taking into account the suggestions made above.

Good luck!

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The Ms has been improved. I have noted that over 95% of the cutest references at the list of references are Chinese. This is not fair, the authors should somehow use other original citations with some recent references.

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The paper is obviously improved. The authors have considered all my comments.

Author Response

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