Response of Landscape and Ecological Characteristics to the Optimal Rainwater Harvesting Dual-Element Mulch Covered Soil Model in Beijing
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is well-organized and well-written. It can be processed for final publication just after a few minor revisions.
The abstract section needs to have more details about your new findings, while you do not need to provide some details about the background that you mentioned in the introduction part.
Try to use shorter sentences and avoid long sentences.
You provided so many equations. They need a better explanation about how they work and their function.
You need to provide more comparison between your findings and other studies and discuss about it.
Author Response
The paper is well-organized and well-written. It can be processed for final publication just after a few minor revisions.
The abstract section needs to have more details about your new findings, while you do not need to provide some details about the background that you mentioned in the introduction part.
The abstract section have more details about my new findings in lines 22-30.
Try to use shorter sentences and avoid long sentences.
I have modified in the paper.
You provided so many equations. They need a better explanation about how they work and their function.
The equations explanation are added.
You need to provide more comparison between your findings and other studies and discuss about it.
The comparison findings have been added in lines 344-346 and lines 368-369
Reviewer 2 Report
Manuscript ID: water-462619
Title: Response of landscape and ecological characteristics to the optimal rainwater harvesting dual-element mulch covered soil model in Beijing
The paper is well designed and well written only some minor corrections are needed, as follows:
Lines 90-92: The missing spaces as well as pH need to be corrected.
Line 101: If Authors choose the cover thickness of 3 cm based on previous studies, the relevant reference (or references) should be cited here.
Lines 154, 159, 163: There is a big difference in the size of equations 7, 8 and 9. It would be good to equalized them.
Lines 272: The Table 5 is not well organized. Maybe the authors can reorganize the table because there is not enough space in the first column.
Line 320: This Eq. is not numbered.
Author Response
itle: Response of landscape and ecological characteristics to the optimal rainwater harvesting dual-element mulch covered soil model in Beijing
The paper is well designed and well written only some minor corrections are needed, as follows:
Lines 90-92: The missing spaces as well as pH need to be corrected.
The PH has been changed to pH in line 92.
Line 101: If Authors choose the cover thickness of 3 cm based on previous studies, the relevant reference (or references) should be cited here.
The relevant reference has been cited in line 101.
Lines 154, 159, 163: There is a big difference in the size of equations 7, 8 and 9. It would be good to equalized them.
The size has been adjusted uniformly for the Eq 7,8,9 in lines 154,159,163
Lines 272: The Table 5 is not well organized. Maybe the authors can reorganize the table because there is not enough space in the first column.
The Table 5 has been adjusted
Line 320: This Eq. is not numbered.
The Eq has been numbered in line 320.
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
Manuscript ID: water-404683
Title: Response of landscape and ecological characteristics to the optimal rainwater harvesting dual-element mulch covered soil model in Beijing
The Authors investigated the optimal soil mulch materials for the typical urban greening shrub (Ligustrum Vicaryi) in regard to physiological characteristics, photosynthetic rate, evaporation rate, stomatal conductance, and water use efficiency. Three mulch materials were selected: gravel (CH1), pine needles + gravel (CH2) and bark + gravel (CH3). According to obtained results all examined soil covers improved the landscape function, physical characteristics, and ecological services of Ligustrum vicaryi, and bark+gravel cover was the optimal one for the typical city greening shrub Ligustrum vicaryi.
The manuscript is well written and designed, the methods and results are well explained, and only some corrections are needed due to few oversights regarding the references and mistakes in the text.
Abstract
The Abstract is very well written. It gives concise data and after reading it is immediately clear what the Authors were investigated in this research and what results were obtained.
Only the Authors should correct the one thing:
Line 20: It is necessary to define the full name for abbreviation CK since it appears here for the first time. In Lines 90-91 it can be seen that CK represents the control sample.
Introduction
The Introduction gives all necessary data which are very well supported by the references. The Authors emphasized the ultimate goal of these research.
Materials and Methods
Lines 77 - 79: The climate at the experimental site is ‘warm sub-humid continental monsoon’, with average temperature of 12.8 ℃annual effective accumulative temperature of 4500 ℃frost-free period of 189 d,…in this sentence Authors should correct the missing spaces.
Line 92: Based on what Authors choose the cover thickness of 3 cm? Are they investigated other thicknesses?
Line 95: one beaker extra should be deleted.
Lines 108, 128 and 130: The numbers of Equations (2), (5) and (6) should be aligned according to others.
Also, some of the symbols in equations and in the text are italic, and some of them are not, so this should be equalized through the paper, as well as the size of the equations.
Lines 124, 126 and 336, 348, 364: Correct CO2 into CO2, as well as the gmol-1.
Lines 149 - 150: The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) was used to determine the weighting of each index of the comprehensive evaluation target. This sentence and the rest of the text regarding the AHP and fuzzy mathematics model should be supported by the relevant references.
In line 158 and in line 168 some bold letters remained.
Table 2, Table 4 and Table 5: The display of the units must be uniformed and in accordance with units elsewhere in the manuscript.
Lines 241 - 242: Fig. 1 The influence of different soil cover treatments on Ligustrum vicaryi photosynthetic characteristics（a,b,c,d is the Gn and Pn, e,f,g,is Gn and Pr…Authors should correct the symbols in the title of Fig. 1. Gn is Gs, in the e,f,g,is Gn and Pr the h is missing and this part of Figure 1 represents Gs not Gn, and Tr not Pr.
Lines 191, 342, 347, and many other parts of the text in Discussion section are highlighted in grey. This should be corrected.
Line 297: I suppose that this equation should be numbered in accordance with others in the manuscript.
Reviewer 2 Report
The present paper describes the effect of mulching on Ligustrum vicaryi characteristics. The paper includes important results on urban greening method using shrub species. However, there are various uncertainties and problems on the present manuscript. Authors should make thoroughly revision of the manuscript.
Lines 82-85: Chemical and physical characteristics of the soil samples used for experiments should be shown. These characteristics directly affect the results. Water permeability, air space, water holding capacity, soil texture and chemical properties should be, at least, shown.
Lines 89-91: Why did authors use gravel, pine needle and tree bark for mulching? Authors should show exact characteristics of these materials: origin, species, sizes, method of treatment, mixture ratio, chemical components, water permeability, water holding capacity, and so on. How is the experimental period (length and season)? If these information are lacking, follow-up experiments will be impossible.
Lines 101-106: How did authors measure leaf area of plants: collected whole leaves and weighed them?
Lines 114-123: Methods of photosynthesis measurements should be exactly described. Authors measured photosynthetic rate at two points and calculated the whole plants' photosynthetic rate by equation (3). Description on the validity of the equation should be shown.
Lines 133-139: Methods of transpiration rate measurements should be exactly described. Description on the validity of the equation (7) should be shown.
Lines 147-187: Authors used the fuzzy mathematical model for estimating the generalized values of landscape function and ecological service function. It is important to compare individual variables of plants (LAI, photosynthetic rate, transpiration rate, and so on) between mulching treatments rather than comparing generalized values. Authors should show the reason why authors used the fuzzy mathematical model?
Table 3: When did authors measured these values? The values depend on growing stage of the plants and season.
Table 4: Same as the data in Table 3, authors should show the date of the measurement. Pn, Tr and WUE depend on light intensity and air humidity, and then these variables should be constant throughout the measurement of the four samples.
Fig. 1: Definition of Gn never appears in the text. Repeated presentation of Gn is not necessary. Explanation on figure (h) is missing in the caption. Does 'Pr' mean 'Tr'? Authors use 'E' as whole plants' transpiration rate in equation (7).
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper is mainly about the growth and physiological aspects of the typical urban greening shrub species Ligustrum vicaryi I in relation to three different soil cover treatments. It is well-organized and well-written. However, it needs some minor changes as follows:
You need to provide more details about your findings in the abstract section
Try to discuss your results in more details and compare your findings with other studies. Moreover, there are many tables in the text that need more clarification. Try to discuss more about each of the tables and the purpose of each of them.
You need to discuss about other scenarios. For example, what other types of soils may have the same or even the better output?
Discuss more about the urban environment and its effect on your results.
