Agricultural Lighting Strategies in Portugal: Insights from DLI Mapping

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript presents Daily Light Integral (DLI) maps of Portugal, computed by the script developed by the authors [13-15]. The same algorithm (or similar, I can not tell because the lack of precise implementation details) has been recently applied by the authors to create DLI maps for Spain [13] and Slovakia [15]. Thus, the originality and novelty of the presented approach is poor, however, the obtained results might be valuable for the field of agronomy.

 

Authors claim that “Other industrial DLI-related maps and visualizations are available. However, they often lack scientific traceability and reproducibility, or they have limited spatial and temporal resolution capabilities”. However, I missed a (detailed) comparison of these to the results presented in the paper.

 

Also, authors say, on page 9, that “it can be concluded that the DLI values show a characteristic pattern as each month passes.” I am wondering, if this pattern could be formalized somehow, e.g. by a mathematical or interpretable machine learning model? Without doing so, the results don’t contain new/shocking revelations except “there is more sunlight in the Summer/South than in the Winter/North”...

 

The manuscript should be proof-read to check the grammar and some typos (e.g. “there is approximation techniques” → “there are approximation techniques, etc.).

Minor issues to refine:

 

- page 6: “...  Geographic GCS projection, WGS84 horizontal datum, and EGM96 vertical datum” → The abbreviations GCS, WGS84 and EGM96 are not defined earlier in the text.

 

- page 13: The first paragraph of the Discussion section sounds like instructions from a template, thus, should rather be removed.

 

- The references [13] and [14] are identical.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper aims to construct dual-scale DLI maps for Portugal and support agricultural lighting decision-making, yet the research questions are ambiguously defined and lack clear scientific hypotheses. While the topic has regional pertinence, it merely applies the mature DLI mapping methodologies from countries like the United States and Spain to Portugal without any theoretical breakthroughs. The core calculations rely on third-party commercial server APIs, resulting in opaque technical details and a lack of algorithmic innovation. The study only adds a "Portugal" geographic label and fails to expand the cognitive boundaries of the field, leading to severely insufficient innovation. Meanwhile, the research does not verify the accuracy of the maps nor conduct field experiments to confirm their guiding value for agricultural production, thus failing to truly address the core issue of "optimizing agricultural lighting strategies".

Although the  authors in the conclusions can summarize the regional-seasonal differentiation patterns of DLI, they are severely disconnected from the supporting evidence: (1) there is no field measurement data to validate the map accuracy, making the conclusions speculative; (2) the feasibility of "integrating multiple thematic layers" is not demonstrated, and crop-specific shading standards based on DLI thresholds are not provided, which cannot support the conclusion of "improving crop management"; (3) the discussion section retains journal template sentences and lacks farm-scale application cases, exposing writing oversights and flaws in argumentation. (4) Lines 382-385 need to be deleted.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

As a reviewer, I commend your diligent revisions. I think the you have adequately addressed my core concerns to warrant acceptance.