Effects of Biodegradable Film and Polyethylene Film Residues on Soil Moisture and Maize Productivity in Dryland

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This study investigated the effects of biodegradable film and polyethylene film residues on soil moisture, maize root and productivity at different residual levels. Similar studies have been previously reported. The novelty of the current manuscript is lacked. Other comments are as following:

 

1 From line 22 to 23, the keywords were not related to the content of the manuscript and should be deleted.

 

2 From line 130 to 131, “The new plastic film shall be covered before sowing…”, After covering the plastic film, how did you sow the seed? Usually, the application of plastic film is after sowing.

 

3 Why was potassium fertilizer not applied?

 

4 Lots of format mistakes appeared in the whole manuscript, such as g kg-1, kg ha-1, cm2, cm3, etc. Please check and correct these errors all over the manuscript.

 

5 From line 160 to 161, “Soil water storage (SWS) is the product of SWC, the average soil bulk density in each layer, and the depth of the soil layer”. How did you measure the soil bulk density in each layer?

 

6 In Figure 3, I can not recognize the significant differences between different treatment for the residual film density. The ANOVA should be conducted and significant letters should be added to the Figure after making multiple comparisons between different treatments.

 

7 From line 225 to 227, what is the soil depth of the SWC here? From line 244 to 246, what is the soil depth of the RLD and RSD here? Similar statements need to be clarified.

 

8 In Table 1, what is the data in the two middle rows of the table mean?

 

9 For the Discussion section, the effect of residual film on degradation process and root-shoot synergy should also be discussed.

 

10 The language of the whole manuscript need to be improved by native English speaker.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Hi dear

This article " Effects of biodegradable film and polyethylene film residues on soil moisture and maize productivity in dryland” was revised and has a novelty and I recommend it for publication after consideration of the following comments.

Title: If you can rewrite and make it more interesting for readers. I propose: “Effects of biodegradable and polyethylene films residues on soil moisture and maize productivity in dryland”.

·       Line 11: Please change “biodegradable film and polyethylene film residues (RBF and RPF)” to “biodegradable film and polyethylene film residues (BFR and PFR)”.

·       The type of statistical design used in this research should be mentioned.

·       Line 19: precipitation use efficiency. Is it right?

·       Line 18-20: Please revise this sentence in expressing the data comparing.

·       Line 156 etc.: Please provide the right referencing according to the guidelines of MDPI’s journals.

·       Figure 4. It is better to provide these data as a comprehensive table or at least the statistical comparing will be done. This stage have vague for readers.

·       Table 2: Please consider the standard deviation for data included in the table.

·       The way of expressing the method of measuring macronutrients and other parameters has a scientific flaw. Please take help from the following article for the correct way of expressing it, so that the standard number of the working method should be clearly stated (https://doi.org/10.1590/fst.60820).

·       Discussion text must grammar improve and in some cases it is very weak and maybe there is no discussion at all.

·       Conclusion is very general, try to make it more scientific, comprehensive and concise in detail, especially.

References: It is not OK.

The article has many flaws in express and concept of English; it is suggested to be revised in a scientific and native way.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This work investigated the effects of biodegradable film on water holding capacity and crop yield, etc., and aims to explore the available film application amount which not influence the crop yield with the optimum water holding capacity. This work is meaningful for agricultural film management. However, some grammar errors and scientific problems exists which were given as below:

1.     Line 13: residual level of BF of PF? Significant differences among which treatments? Error in “150 kg ha-1”.

2.     Grammar error shown in “which was higher than that of RPF at 0.69%”, “had better performance, more plant biomass accumulation, and the root-shoot ratio was closer to the no residual film treatments.”. “increased by” should be changed to “was increased by”.

3.     Line 22-23: wrong keywords were shown here, please delete.

4.     Line 39: More evidence should be cited to support this viewpoint “About 40% of China's cultivated land is located in the Loess Plateau”.

5.     Line 49-50: This reference (Yan et al., 2006) was too old, please refer to some recently published paper, e.g., 10.1016/j.jclepro.2021.128777. Line 51-53: Special cases should be introduced to support this viewpoint, e.g., plastics generated from agricultural film can be vector for HMs transition.

6.     Line 76-80: Is there any references which can reveal the effects of agricultural films on crop production and growth? The authors should focus on this research field progress, and make a progress introduction, afterwards, they can logically demonstrate their scientific hypotheses.

7.     Line 96: “70m” should be changed to “70 m”; Line 91: From which month in 2020 to 2021?

8.     Line 99: The “longitude and latitude” should be given; how to determine the “The meteorological data..”?

9.     Line 111-115: How to apply the basic fertilizer, e.g., rotary tillage depth? What are the initial input amount of agricultural films? How to remove the surplus film after the experiment?

10.  Line 226-227: The comma should be insert in correct form.

11.  Line 239: Determination significance of the maize root morphology should be briefly introduced first. And why did authors focus on diverse V6, VT, R3, and R6 stages of plant biomass in Lin 165, please make an explanation too.

12.  Line 259: The “root-shoot synergy” was not well revealed, lack of enough evidence, please improve.

13.  Line 295-297: Did the author consider the mechanisms behind this phenomena? If the 75 kg ha-1 film was left in soil annually, will this cause the crop reduction in following years?

14.  Line 395: The detailed reasons on “A smaller RSR is more conducive to the accumulation of aboveground biomass in the crop, improving grain yield and WUE” should be given.

15.  Line 398-400: “but the root showed a stronger adaptation mechanism to adversity compared to the shoot, leading to an increase in RSR under the residual film treatments”, this sentence should be improved, e.g., adaptation mechanisms should be changed to adaptation ability, any other cases similar to this phenomenon, and why.

16.  Line 419-420: Grammar error shown here.

17.  Line 421-422: Critical mechanisms and probably reasons should be concluded and given here. Line 424: Can this method simulate the practical film application in field?

18.  Line 442-443: This threshold should be mentioned with specific observation period, e.g., within two years.

19.  Line 455: What are cost difference between these two materials, can BF be practically used in the future?

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

In the manuscript "Effects of biodegradable film and polyethylene film residues on soil moisture and maize productivity in dryland" the authors performed a 2-year experiment with maize under different mulching conditions.

The overall manuscript is alright. The main concern is about the experiments where conducted. Based on the design shown in Figure 2, half of the soil/plants/roots would be exposed to the atmosphere. In this case, the mulch might not reduce soil evaporation due to the area exposition (please search for papers about soil moisture, water balance, and mulch for section 4.1).

I also suggest the authors include citations/references in lines 32-34. In addition, the quality of the figures needs to be improved (low resolution).

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

All raised comments have been addressed. However, the novelty of the manuscript should be strenthend in the Introduction section, i.e., what is the breakthrough of current study when compared with previously published works, but not just the repetition of former researchers' work. 

Author Response

We would like to express our sincere thanks to you for the constructive and positive comments. Regarding your suggestion on the novelty of the manuscript, we have modified the introduction.

Line 64-67: The effects of residual film on soil physicochemical properties and crop root growth have been reported by former researchers, but we know little about crop root-shoot relationships and assimilate allocation under residual film stress.

Line 73-75: Previous studies have focused on residual PF, the effects of residues generated during BF degradation on the soil-crop system in dryland are not clear, and their feasibility to replace PF still needs to be discussed.

Reviewer 2 Report

Hi

It seems that the dear author has answered and applied my scientific suggestions one by one. In my opinion, the revised article is publishable

Author Response

Hello!

We would like to express our sincere thanks to you for the constructive and scientific comments. Thank you again for your recognition of our work.