Increased Soil Aggregate Stability by Altering Contents and Chemical Composition of Organic Carbon Fractions via Seven Years of Manure Addition in Mollisols

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Overall, manuscript contains useful data and can be a good contribution to literature related to soil organic carbon and soil aggregate stability, However, the presentation of manuscript and the data is not ideal and needs thorough revision.

In this manuscript, authors have used numerous abbreviations (e.g., SM, Tem FTIR etc.). The use of abbreviations does not follow underlying rules. Abbreviations must be described at their first appearance in the text. Please verify the use of abbreviations.

Authors need to revise the abstract and conclusion sections. Authors have mentioned numerous results in the conclusion section which should be in the abstract. In conclusion, authors need to mention the findings only rather than quantitative data.
Also convert dairy manure quantity (15000 kg 0r 30000 kg) to tons per ha. it could be useful for readers.

The authors mentioned Soybean-Maize rotation, so mostly these both are kharif crops, how its rotation will be followed?, needed detail. if the maize is spring season crop then it could be mentioned in methodology. 

The paper should be checked thoroughly and revised 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The paper presents interesting results concerning the influence of long-term manure application on soil aggregation. The authors have to explain why they  used MWD, GMD and D for the estimation of the aggregate stability as these indicators are based on dry sieving and do not reflect the influence of any water treatment of soil samples. It is not clear while the values of MWD vary till 1 without any units, as it has to represent the mean weight diameter in mm. The authors have to explain all parameters and abbreviations.which they used otherwise it is difficult for the reader to understand the results. The section with materials and methods has to be improved in this direction..

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I'm glad to review the revise version of this manuscript. The overall idea of the study is very interesting and deserves credit. The authors did their best to improve the paper and response to every comments of mine. However, this study does still can be further improved. 

The abstract is now in good written form but do not propose clearly the goals of the experiment. Beside this I found many citations are very old and needed to replace with recent citations. i am providing few recent articles and include in your introduction and discussion sections which will improve and facilitate your findings.

Imran and Amanullah. (2022). Integration of peach (Prunus persica L) remnants in combination with beneficial microbes and phosphorus differ phosphorus use efficiency, agronomic efficiency and partial factor productivity in soybean Vs maize crops. Journal of Plant Nutrition.  doi.org/10.1080/01904167.2022.2099890

Imran, Amanullah and Abdel Rehman Altawaha. 2022. Carbon Assimilation and Dry Matter Partitioning in Soybean Ameliorates with the Integration Of Nano-Black Carbon, Along With Beneficial Microbes and Phosphorus Fertilization. Journal of Plant Nutrition, DOI:10.1080/01904167.2022.2035753

Yang, Y., Li, T., Wang, Y., Cheng, H., Chang, S. X., Liang, C.,... An, S. (2021). Negative effects of multiple global change factors on soil microbial diversity. Soil biology & biochemistry, 156, 108229. doi: 10.1016/j.soilbio.2021.108229

Yang, Y., Dou, Y., Wang, B., Wang, Y., Liang, C., An, S.,... Kuzyakov, Y. (2022). Increasing contribution of microbial residues to soil organic carbon in grassland restoration chronosequence. Soil Biology and Biochemistry, 170, 108688. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soilbio.2022.108688

Beside this, The experimental design and the biological analysis are adequate and no need any improvement. Statistics must be improved in order to become more objective to the most important results, I suggest to create a supplementary file with extra information that are important to cite, but not much important to achieve the conclusions (e. g. soil chemical and physical properties before and after harvest in the studied area). Multivariate analysis could be applied to summarize the effect of different factors, once the experimental design brings different factor do consider. 
I am highly recommending this paper for publication after incorporation of comments and related references provided. 

Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The authors significantly improved the description of the applied methods and included the appropriate explanations of the used symbols. There are some minor revisions which have to be done:

line 25: 30 t ha-1

всхе 1091; paration ?

line: 1120: sizes

line 1250: maybe "1620/2920 ratio" is more correctly than "rate"

 line 1310:: content was

line 1311-1312: The sentence needs revision

Author Response

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