Identifying the Best Herbicides for Weed Control in Chicory (Cichorium intybus)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

The manuscript was improved. However, significant results are not yet highlighted in figures using asterisks or letters. Please provide that.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to submit a revised draft of the manuscript “Identifying the best herbicides for weed control in Chicory (Cichorium intybus)” for publication in the Agriculture. We appreciate the time and effort that you dedicated to providing feedback on our manuscript and are grateful for the insightful comments on and valuable improvements to our paper. We have incorporated your suggestions and highlighted in yellow within the manuscript.

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 3)

Accept in present form.

Accept in present form.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to submit a revised draft of the manuscript “Identifying the best herbicides for weed control in Chicory (Cichorium intybus)” for publication in the Agriculture. We appreciate the time and effort that you dedicated to providing feedback on our manuscript and are grateful for the insightful comments on and valuable improvements to our paper.

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Greetings!

The manuscript “The assessment of herbicides for weed control in Chicory (Cichorium intybus) under soil and climatic conditions of the Russian Federation" investigates the field effect of different herbicides on the management of dicotyledonous weeds and on chicory in Russian Federation.

Some alterations are necessary to be performed before publishing.

The manner to refer to herbicides needs to follow a pattern to avoid confusion. For example, after presenting imazethapyr as Zeta SC, it is better to use only the term "Zeta SC" to refer to it. Please work on that.

Abbreviation in line 45 needs to be explained as same as the one in line 181. Please do that.

There is a useless parenthesis in line 182. Please remove it.

Regarding figures: in graphs, x axis, the name of herbicides or an abbreviation previously presented in text needs to be fully displayed. The results of statistical analysis need to be displayed in these images using asterisks or letters, to indicate significant results. In Figure 6 SD bars are missing. The numbers of figures are wrongly presented: in line 46, in captions from figures 4 to 7 (that are in fact figures 2 to 5). The numbers of tables are also wrong. Please fix these aspects.

Punctuation needs attention. For example, there is a dot missing in line 42 and a useless virgula in line 11. 

Spacing also needs to be revised. For example, in line 58 before Poland.

Regarding “Introduction” it would be interesting to add a paragraph to address main weeds that threat chicory. 

When it comes to “Materials and Methods", in subsection 2.1 a picture from chicory would be an interesting addition. In subsection 2.4 it is necessary to present which statistical analysis was performed: t test, one-way ANOVA, two-way ANOVA... Please dedicate attention to that.

Regarding "Results" it is necessary to present photos from the aspects highlighted (yellowing and burns on the leaves). Figures presented in this section contain the problems mentioned on the paragraph above dedicated to them. In line 220: which other variants? It is necessary to specify. Line 254 is confusing. It is necessary to rewrite. 

Moderate editing of English language is necessary. English needs to be improved specially in paragraph 1 from "Introduction" and in line 75.

Reviewer 2 Report

The experiment was not properly designed and the herbicide effect was not properly indicated. Two runs of field experiment in different years or different cities are necessary in this research. But the authors missed one of them. In addition, the biomass is properly used to evaluate the effective of herbicides, rather than plant height used in this manuscript.

Some minor errors are as follows.

Introduction

L33-L62 It is unnecessary to introduce the plant and production of chicory so detailed. Authors should focus on the topic of their manuscript.

M&M

How did authors evaluate the effect of herbicide in field experiment? Please indicate it.

The field experiment must be repeated in different years or in different cities.

L136-149 Why did authors discuss climate here?

Table 3 use the active ingredient in the column of rate

Section 2.3 please show the characteristic parent and daughter ions used to qualify and quantify those herbicides and the key parameters of the mass spectrometric.

Section 2.4 How did authors check the significant differences between different treatments?

Results

Why authors select a field without grass weeds to test the effect of haloxyfop and fluazifop? As I know, these herbicides control grass weeds only and are very safe to broad leaf weeds.

Why did authors evaluate the controlling effect at 13 days after treatment? Some herbicides, such as imazethapyr and imazamox need about 20 days to kill weeds. In fact, weeds didn’t die at the 13rd days after treatment according to the supplement materials.

And why the extensively used biomass was not selected to evaluate the herbicide effect in this experiment?  

ok

Reviewer 3 Report

The manuscript entitled in "Assessment of herbicides for weed control in Chicory (Cichorium intybus) under soil and climatic conditions of the Russian Federation" is not suitable for publication in Agriculture. The manuscript is scientifically poor.

See comments below:

Abstrat: You do not need to justify the choice of herbicides here. Always use the term "herbicide" and not "pesticide". How much was the monocot control? There are ACCase inhibitor herbicides that are graminicides. Always write the name of the active ingredient, not the commercial name. The scientific name of weed in Latin never has an accent.

Introduction: Fig. 1 is unnecessary.

Material and Methods: Fig. 4 is also unnecessary.

What were the extraction methods for each herbicide? Was the analysis of the herbicides done by HPLC or LC/MSMS? And the validation method? LoQ? LoD? Chromatograms? Retention time? Selectivity? Linearity? If you don't have all these parameters you can't trust your method.

Results: Figures are poor and plotted in Excel. Treatment names are incomplete "+....". What are the tests of means used?

The photos of the weeds in the supplemental material are unnecessary.

Table 4. The data for 0 and 120 d are not clear.

Discussion: Why were no residues found? The discussion says nothing about this.

Conclusion: This should be from your study and not implications for farmers.

References: are very old and few.

Adequate.