Arthropod Community Responses Reveal Potential Predators and Prey of Entomopathogenic Nematodes in a Citrus Orchard

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In their manuscript, Dritsoulas et al. investigated the effects of the application of entomopathogenic nematodes, as biological control agents, on soil fauna and fungal flora, as well as compared the length of the prevalence of two nematode species in the treated soil. The manuscript is generally well-written and raises an interesting and important question both from the sustainable agriculture and conservation point of view. The experimental design and the used methods are scientifically sound (please note that I am not qualified to judge any part of the molecular part, including bioinformatics). In my opinion, the statistical methods could be improved by utilising multivariate methods and suggesting the Authors include at least a basic ordination, or even a repeated measures RDA/db-RDA. Another point which needs a moderate amount of work to adjust would be to provide full species names, with authors and the year of description, for the known species both in the main text and in Supplementary Table 1. This is important from a taxonomic point of view and has great importance nowadays when taxonomic knowledge is scarce yet undiscovered biodiversity is abundant. I found it odd that whilst the Authors claim in the Discussion that “The rDNA primers used here were optimized 94 for nematode coverage and the fungal taxonomic resolution was inadequate to explore 95 the treatment effects on F. solani or any commonly reported nematophagous fungi.”, fungi are still included in the analysis – I would be very critical with their inclusion. I miss a significant discussion point from the last sections: what these findings can mean to conservation biocontrol, non-target invertebrates, or to the efficiency of using EPNs, and how can this influence the current practices EPN applications.

Other than this I mostly have minor comments, commonly related to inconsistent terminology, unclear or vague wording, and some typos (Please see all comments in the attached pdf. Chunks of text with comments are underlined with squiggly lines). Once this, moderate, revision has been done, in my opinion, the manuscript is ready for publication.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We would like to sincerely thank you for your insightful comments and suggestions. They have helped us greatly to improve the manuscript, and our responses follow. We followed the suggestions with very few exceptions. Importantly, we have performed redundancy analyses for nematodes and microarthropods that show the individual taxa patterns described broadly in the narrative. Those plots are now included as supplemental figures. We have entered all authorities on species names and supplementary information on family data, following your instructions on the format of name references in the text. However, we chose not to include the species authorities in the supplemental table because many of them are not provided in the NCBI database and blast detection is often an approximation of species identification. Our goal with the supplemental Table 1 is to provide background for future research, which we can utilize accession numbers to assess the quality of the taxonomic resolution. We agree with your concern about the fungal identifications and eliminated consideration of these data.

Reviewer 2 Report

Journal: Agronomy

Manuscript Number: agronomy-1944468

Title: Arthropod community responses reveal potential predators and prey of entomopathogenic nematodes in a citrus orchard

Decision: Minor revision/Accept

Comments:

Entomopathogenic nematodes (EPNs) are obligate lethal parasites of several insect pests of crop plants. Upon application their fate in soil is not clearly understood under field conditions. The present study tried to solve this problem and investigated changes in arthropod communities in a citrus orchard following soil inundation with 2 species of EPNs. The manuscript is drafted nicely. The study is conducted using standard methodology also the results of the study are written properly and discussed appropriately. The present work has its own importance and significance therefore can be accepted in the journal agronomy by following some very minor corrections suggested in the attached file. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We thank the reviewer for the kind comments and suggestions.  His suggestion in the narrative were very helpful in improving the manuscript.  We followed all the suggestions with no exception.