Geographical Variation in the Growth and Nutritional Traits of Leaf Powder from Broussonetia papyrifera (L.) L’Hér. ex Vent. from Different Provenances

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The content of the manuscript has scientific merit.  The article needs significant improvement, especially in writing. There were many repetitions of words in the sentences, lack of adequate punctuation, outdated references, the introduction did not provide enough information about the problem studied, the material and methods did not provide enough information about the analyses, especially statistics, etc. The discussion needs to be rewritten as well. Therefore, the article needs improvement on different items. Other suggestions can be found throughout the text.

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Author Response

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Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript is not well prepared and the quality of the manuscript can not be judged in its current form.

The quality of the figures is very low. The overall presentation of the manuscript lacks appropriate good formatting.

The methods are not clear and needs more details.

The introduction is not sufficient.

Author Response

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Reviewer 3 Report

Manuscript is of good importance.

Here are my comments and suggestions for its improvement: 

The abstract is too wordy and I will suggest the authors insert some figures (value, % etc.) 

Figure 1 needs to be improved,

The analysis relly need to be adjusted as the description is poor, Which r package was used for the analysis, how the variable were considered, actor, random fixed etc. please clarified this. did you scaled the data before analysis? if yes how as you have both quantitative and qualitative, if I think you should explore it. table 1 can go into supplementary. For the clustering get the Kmean value for each group and compared them

Author Response

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Reviewer 4 Report

This is an interesting manuscript, but you may improve this article because I have found a lot of mistakes. Otherwise, I have several recommendations to increase the quality of your paper.

In the article title you must write the scientific name in italics. As well you must write the author of the species because this is a journal of Botany.

There are several keywords repeated in the article title. The keywords are “Broussonetia papyrifera” and “nutritional traits”. In order to increase the visibility of your paper I recommend changing these keywords. If you change them by other keywords which are not in the article title, you will increase the probability that your paper could be found by future readers when they look for your paper in some databases like Scopus for example. If you repeat the same words in the article title and in keywords, less people could find your work. So, you must think about the visibility of your research.

Line 17. You must write the author of the scientific name.

Line 35. Because this is a journal of Botany you must write the author of the species, please, write the author of Broussonetia papyrifera.

Line 42. Just after a point you must write the word in capitals. Please, write “The extracts…”

Line 43. Please, do not write capitals just after a comma. Please, fix this mistake.

Line 55. Please, write the scientific names in italics and with the correspondent author.

Just at the end of the Introduction you must write explicitly the objectives of your research.

Line 67. It is very difficult to read the letters inside the map. Please, write the letters much higher.

Line 80. I do not understand why you write a point at the end of “Provenance” in the Table 1.

Line 84. When you write an acronym put the letters of it in capitals. Please, write “Ground Diameter”. If fix this mistake in the whole paper a future reader will find easier to read it.

Line 88. “Dry Matter” must be written in capitals because are the letters of the acronym “DM”. Please, remember that the first time that you write an acronym in an article you must put into brackets its meaning. You must fix this very common mistake in the whole manuscript.

Line 89. I do not understand why the acronym of “crude fat” is “EE”, please, explain it briefly.

Line 95. The order of “genetic variation coefficient” and the acronym “CVG” are not in order. Please, fix this mistake. Fix it in the whole manuscript.

Line 123. Write the scientific name in italics.

Line 237. The word “It” is in capitals just in the middle of the text. Please, fix this mistake.

Line 257. You must write a space just before the word “However”.

Line 264. There is a doble space just after “growth traits”, please, delete one space.

Line 305. Inside the bracket there is a space just before the acronym “FJNP”. Please, fix this mistake.

Otherwise, the authors adequately developed the Introduction and presenting the problem.

Just at the end of the Introduction you must write explicitly the objectives of your research.

The methods are adequate.

The Discussion is well developed, and the data presented are correctly compared with other papers.

The authors are to be congratulated for the results obtained in this article.

Author Response

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Reviewer 5 Report

to me the title is a bit strange, because the authors focus on leaf powder and its traits; usually the traits of plants are in focus of a study and the preparation of leaf powder is part of the method, so why not only  "Geographical variation in the growth and nutritional traits of Broussonetia papyrifera from different provenances"?

l38 what does strong positve tree mean? this statement doesn't meet the requirements of a scientific paper

l40 something missing..high heat tolerance?

l41... plant is listed as medicine, high medicinal value"...of medicinal value?

Fig. 1 is bad to read; I'm not sure whether the authors use the term "provenance" in the right way;  from the map it seems that these are accessions or different populations

Material and methods is not well described, so it remains unclear how many seeds were collected from how many trees; Tab. 2 N=number of samples is missing

L108 this statement is too broad, because the authors tested the material only once in one environment and as the authors didn't perform any controlled crossings of plant material it's inappropriate to say that the genetic improvement potential is great...there seems to be a various phenotypic plasticity for specific traits but even this should be tested for several test sides and conditions. In this context it would be interesting to receive information about the test site and why it was chosen.

l172 It can be seen from the trend surface diagram(Figure 2). ...something missing?

l183 it seems there is a remark from the co-author????

CVG what's the basis of this

l208-210 "From the perspective of feed raw material production, the breeding of high-quality varieties is carried out, and the main goal of breeding is to select excellent provenances with fast growth, large biomass and high protein content". The authors selected genotypes (seeds) from different populations, but they didn't perform breeding...or am I wrong?

Author Response

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Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I am ok with the revised manuscript