Development of a Decision Support System for Animal Health Management Using Geo-Information Technology: A Novel Approach to Precision Livestock Management

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The manuscript needs major revision

(1) In line 42, the author's description of the five obstacles encountered by practitioners and their solutions is overly general. The following text does not provide a detailed breakdown of the obstacles and the author's solutions.

 (2) In line 158, RFID technology is mentioned as one of the author's focuses, but the author has hardly referenced any literature on the use of RFID technology for livestock.

 (3) The quality of the images in the article is poor. The clarity of the images in the text should be improved.

 (4) In line 282, it is important to determine specific evaluation metrics for the system, such as accuracy and false detection rate. Additionally, the article should reflect whether the system's predictions of animal behavior and disease status align with the actual results.

 (5) In line 405, the feeding time, quantity, and health conditions of the livestock used in the experiment should be described in detail. It should also be clarified whether the different health conditions of the livestock correspond to different signal ranges.

(6) All figures(1-6) should be more clearly.

I advise including the following paper as reference in your manuscript. The reference is pivotal as it offer valuable insights and methodologies pertinent to your research area, and could provide a comprehensive backdrop for your analysis.

Chipless RFID-inspired Sensing for Smart Agriculture: A Review. Sensors and Actuators: A. Physical, DOI: 10.1016/j.sna.2023.114725

minor revision

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

I found your research very interesting. Notwithstanding this, some corrections are required. Please, can you see the pdf in attached?

Regards 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

The quality of English is more than satisfactory.

Author Response

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Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This work aimed at adapting and developing a decision-making system to address livestock management challenges in southern Africa. The topic is relevant and important to enhance livestock farming in Africa. Furthermore, the material and methods section clearly presented the precision agriculture tool used in this study. However, several aspects of the manuscript must be improved. See my comments below.

Introduction: this section is a bit too long and seems to be less relevant to the objectives. The introduction reads like a mini review but is disconnected with the objectives.

Figures 3 and 4: use high-res images

Results: the content appears not to be real results but rather the information generated from the adapted system. What is considered ground truth data in this study? How well is the system suited into the context? In addition, Section 3.2 only presented analytical curves of two individuals as examples. How does this help validating that the adapted system is suitable for herd management?

Limitations (Section 4.2): despite the error-prone operation model that involves human labor, what are the chances for false positives and false negatives by adapting the model? Further, as mentioned in Section 2.3, several tags will need to be placed in individual animals and onboard battery is required. How practical and scalable is such a model in real-world livestock farming especially for resource-limited farms?

Author Response

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Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

The article entitled “Development of a Decision Support System for Animal Health Management Using Geo-Information Technology: A Novel Approach to Precision Livestock Management”, is interesting in general, presenting the development of an advanced geospatial model that has been developed to predict the best locations for cultivating sericea lespedeza, enabling farmers to pinpoint the most advantageous sites for growing this forage crop, thus enhancing the nutrition and well-being of their livestock. Furthermore, by analysing radio-frequency identification (RFID) transponder signals from two farms in South Africa, signal ranges pertinent to the system for monitoring animal health and detecting behaviours linked to predator attacks or poaching incidents were determined.
Some comments deriving from studying the paper are as follows:
-    Although the introductory section is solid, further elucidation is suggested to effectively showcase the innovative aspects of this research and underscore its focus on addressing an existing gap in the field under investigation. Moreover, it is recommended, for the benefit of the readership, to conclude the introduction section with a paragraph outlining the structure of the article.
-    The methodology employed in this study is clearly outlined and assessed, yielding quite interesting results that may inspire other researchers to replicate certain elements of this approach.
-    Since this work is related to the adoption of mobile-based electronic technologies to monitor animal activity (line 51) and the software designed for issuing animal health alerts (line 552-553) is currently being integrated with a mobile APP under development to provide health warnings to farmers via their smartphones, the authors are suggested to take into consideration the works for chatbots as in https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29516-5_80, https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-0200-2.ch01, and https://doi.org/10.1109/IBSSC47189.2019.8973066 for enhancing this perspective in the context of this article.
-    The figures presented in this study generally have low resolution. It is highly advisable to update them with higher resolution versions.
-    The conclusions section appears relatively concise. To enhance the paper's quality, it would be beneficial to expand this section, delving deeper into the research findings and their broader implications. Adding also some directions for future research, would be interesting.

The paper is well-structured in general and written in appropriate English language according to the standards of the Journal, however some minor spell-checking might be of need.

Author Response

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Thanks

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf