Drought and Salinity Stresses Response in Three Korean Native Herbaceous Plants and Their Suitability as Garden Plants

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

This manuscript investigated the physiological responses of three native Korean herbaceous plants to drought and salt stress, and assessed their potential as horticultural plants. The methodology is rather comprehensive, encompassing physiological indicators, biochemical indicators, and principal component analysis. The findings indicated that C. boottiana exhibited a high tolerance to drought and salt stress, while M. grandiflora and C. forficula are relatively more sensitive. The conclusion of the paper argued that C. boottiana can be a potential sustainable and adaptable horticultural plant material. The manuscript is well-written, and easy to follow. Overall, this paper possessed certain academic and application values.

However, the current version is somewhat lack of novelty. Methods were generally conventional, and the plant materials were also common. Therefore, the authors need to highlight a new insight in the scientific question, which they did not do.

Before this manuscript can be published, the first important thing is to address a clear scientific question, which should be appear at the end of the section of Introduction.

The second major issue is that this study seems to be an experiment on screening stress resistant plants. However, they only tested three plant species, which is too few. Not to mention that the authors already knew that C. grandiflora and C. forficula often grow in wet habitats, while C. boottiana is “tolerant” (Ls. 57-62). If the authors can not add a new experiment, they need to discuss more by comparing relative data from  publications focusing on other plants.

Some other minor issues

1. In the Introduction section, the authors talked a lot about the invasive plants, but the relationship between these contents and this study is very week. Please strengthen it.

2. L.61. What did you mean by “comparable habitats”?

3. “Grasses” sometimes refers to “Poaceae plants”. Please use “herbs” instead when you refer to all kinds of herbaceous plants.

4. Please give more details about your water treatments in Methods. For instance. How to define “well-watered“? Why irrigate every 3 days can be well-watered? And I do not understand Ls. 108-109. What do you mean by this sentence? Measurements of chlorophyll parameters should be described more. Although ref. 34 was cited, what kind of methods were used should be clarified.

5. Section 3.1. Consider use more quantitative data rather than only describing the photos.

6. Figure 7. You can merge (a) and (c), as well as (b) and (d). In addition, the legend in (d) is incorrect.

7. Discussion. More stress-tolerant mechanisms should be discussed by introducing more relative references. The application prospect also needs to be talked about, such as resistance breeding or landscape design.

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

The English could be improved to more clearly express the research.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Title: Abiotic stress response in native herbaceous plants and their suitability as garden plants under global climate change

We are pleased to resubmit for publication the revised version of entitled “Abiotic stress response in native herbaceous plants and their suitability as garden plants under global climate change”. We are very grateful to the Reviewer for deep and detailed comments which have helped us to improve on our manuscript. We have revised our manuscript according to your suggestions and comments. We have carefully addressed comments by reviewer as outlined below. We hope that the reviewer will be satisfied with author's reply to the review report and the revised version.

Please see the attachment.

Sincerely yours,

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The topic of the article entitled “Abiotic stress response in native grasses and their suitability as garden plants under global climate change” is very interesting and has novelty.  The article is well written, while are presented interesting data for several matters. Some additional data should be added for growth parameters (e.g. dry biomass of above-ground part of the plants) of three examined monocotyledons species.  Thus, this article can be accepted for publication on Horticulturae journal after minor revision.

 

Comments

Title, Line 2: The term grasses should be replaced with the term monocotyledons since the species that belong to the Cyperaceae family are not grasses. The same correction should be made throughout the text.

Abstract: Data for some parameters should be included in this part.

Introduction: This part is well written. Authors should add information about the ornamental value of the three species (lines 57-63).

Material and methods: This part needs minor revision. Auhtors should add information about when the measurements were made (e.g., section 2.2).

Line 94: “hooks” should be corrected to “Hook.”.

Line 96: Information about the growth stage of plants at the planting period should be added.

Sections 2.3, 2.4, and 2.4: Authors should add information about the sampling date (e.g., days after planting when the samples were taken).

Results: This section is well written, while the quality of Figures is acceptable. However, more data should be presented. Authors should present data for some growth parameters (e.g., above-ground biomass).

Discussion: This part is well written and needs minor revision.

Line 358: Line 358: In this line, the authors state that resistant plants have no significant effect on growth. This should be supported by adding data to the results section as Ι mentioned earlier and should be compared with the results of other studies.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Title: Abiotic stress response in native herbaceous plants and their suitability as garden plants under global climate change

We are pleased to resubmit for publication the revised version of entitled “Abiotic stress response in native herbaceous plants and their suitability as garden plants under global climate change”. We are very grateful to the Reviewer for deep and detailed comments which have helped us to improve on our manuscript. We have revised our manuscript according to your suggestions and comments. We have carefully addressed comments by reviewer as outlined below. We hope that the reviewer will be satisfied with author's reply to the review report and the revised version.

Please see the attachment.

Sincerely yours,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper is well-written and clearly expressed, demonstrating the author's high level of English proficiency. The study analyzes, from a horticultural perspective, the capacity of three native Korean plants (Melica grandiflora, Carex boottiana, and Carex forficula) to cope with drought and salinity stress under the background of global warming, as well as their potential for development in urban gardening. The study employs a rigorous experimental design to assess the physiological changes in these three plants when faced with drought and salinity stress, logically analyzing parameters such as photosynthesis, chlorophyll, malondialdehyde (MDA), and reactive oxygen species (O₂•⁻ and H₂O₂). The results indicate that Melica grandiflora and Carex forficula experience declines in photosynthetic rate, water use efficiency, chlorophyll, and carotenoid content under drought or saline conditions, while Carex boottiana maintains high water use efficiency and stable levels of chlorophyll and carotenoids even under severe drought and salinity stress. Furthermore, biochemical analyses reveal that C. boottiana has lower levels of malondialdehyde and reactive oxygen species (O₂•⁻ and H₂O₂) under stress conditions compared to the other species, indicating its higher adaptability to drought and salinity stress. This suggests that C. boottiana has potential as an urban landscaping plant in the face of severe climatic challenges. However, after serious reading and in-depth consideration, I still have a few minor questions that I would like to discuss with the author.

1. As we know, drought stress and salt stress often occur simultaneously. Why was there no experimental group designed for plants experiencing both drought and salt stress?

2. Would the results in Table 2 and Table 3 be more intuitively presented in graphical form?

3. What are the differences in the responses of the three plants when facing the same stress? I am confident that the author already has this data, and I believe including this result would better illustrate the differences among the species.

4. Regarding the PCA analysis, why is the center point of the graph not at the intersection where both the x and y coordinates are zero? This confuses me.

5. The clarity of the images in the paper is somewhat low. More importantly, for the bar charts, the error bars on the darker colored bars are not fully visible due to the color.

6. The placement of the vertical axis titles for all figures in the paper is inconsistent. For example, in Figure 4, the vertical axis titles for graphs a and c are on the left side, while in graphs c and d they are on the right side, and in Figures 5 and 6, the vertical axis labels for each subplot are positioned at the top of the graphs.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Title: Abiotic stress response in native herbaceous plants and their suitability as garden plants under global climate change

We are pleased to resubmit for publication the revised version of entitled “Abiotic stress response in native herbaceous plants and their suitability as garden plants under global climate change”. We are very grateful to the Reviewer for your deep and detailed comments which have helped us to improve on our manuscript. We have revised our manuscript according to your suggestions and comments. We have carefully addressed comments by reviewer as outlined below. We hope that the reviewer will be satisfied with author's reply to the review report and the revised version.

Please see the attachment.

Sincerely yours,

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors have made significant improvements and revisions based on the reviewers' comments.