Non-Invasive Monitoring of the Thermal and Morphometric Characteristics of Lettuce Grown in an Aeroponic System through Multispectral Image System

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic is interesting and the entire paper is really well written, clear and easily understandable even for a reader who is not an expert on this topic. This article needs minor revision before publication in the journal AS.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments, we believe that their comments have contributed to obtaining a version of the manuscript of higher quality and more understandable for the readers of Applied Science. Replies to your comments have been highlighted in yellow text.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

The main objective of this paper is about monitoring the thermal and morphometric characterization of lettuce grown in an aeroponic system using multispectral images.

 

Specific comments:

1. The introduction section is very short and must integrate with novelty. Regarding novelty or contribution: the authors should summarize clearly what the novelty or contribution of this work is, or what is the difference/superiority of this work compared with the existing methods, especially in the abstract and introduction section?

2. Lecture review related to the subject of this study is poor.  

3. Please add the flowchart of the proposed methods. more explanation is needed for clarity.

4. Quality of Figure .3 and Figure .8 are not good. Please revised.

5. For every study, it is necessary to compare output results with previous and similar methods. In the current study, we cannot see any comparison.

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments, we believe that their comments have contributed to obtaining a version of the manuscript of higher quality and more understandable for the readers of Applied Science. Replies to your comments have been highlighted in yellow text.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comment 1#. Usually, in the title of a manuscript, you put all major words with capital letters, except prepositions and articles.

Comment 2#. In the Material and Methods section, is not clear to me how many plants (biological replicates) are considered for each one of the 3 crops. This consideration is also important to better understand the statistical analysis. Please add the information.

Comment 3#.  In the Material and Methods section, paragraph 2.5 "Data analysis", please specify which test for checking data distribution you used before running the ANOVA. I assume data were normally distributed, otherwise the more appropriated test to use would have been "Kruskal- Wallis" test, followed by "Dunn's multiple comparison test".

Comment 4#. In the Results chapter, I ask to authors why the leaf and root average temperature obtained from thermal images (Figure 8) did not present any statistical analysis. The same question apply for average leaf fresh mass for three crops (Figure 9) and average leaf area for three crops (Figure 10). Please clarify that point.

Comment 5#. I suggest to shorten a bit the Conclusion chapter, beacause I found it a bit too long. Moreover, you supported your conclusion by calling statistical analysis of the obtained data results from the crop technique and image processing for the three aeroponic crops. But, as said in a previous comment, in my opinion in the graphs there are statistics missing. So I suggest to improve this part, maybe with the help of the new consideration in terms of statistics.

Comment 6#. I found the video in the supplementary material very good. Congratutlation for that.

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments, we believe that their comments have contributed to obtaining a version of the manuscript of higher quality and more understandable for the readers of Applied Science. Replies to your comments have been highlighted in yellow text.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

In this manuscript authors investigate  the possibility to use the non-invasive monitoring of the thermal and morphometric characteristics of lettuce grown in an aeroponic system through multispectral image system, using visible (VIS), near Infrared (NIR) and far infrared (IR) spectra.

The manuscript is well and thoroughly written and it is suitable for publication in Applied Sciences journal, although some minor changes should be made:

 

Lines 2-4: In the title do not combine the words ‘monitoring’ and ‘characterization’, but rather choose one of these two. Or change ‘characterization’ to ‘characteristics’ if you consider that this is suitable.

Line 26: write ‘Visible, Near Infrared and Far Infrared’ with lower case letters.

Line 258-259: Delete the first sentence as this is already stated in section 2.5.

Line 264: Write ‘P ≤ 0.05’ instead of ‘alfa = 0.05’ (or rather write in the section 2.5. that results were considered significantly different if P ≤ 0.05).

Conclusion section: do not repeat the results and do not mention the tables and figures used in the text (and the statistical values) , but give a focus on the general implication of the obtained results in a wider context.

 

 

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments, we believe that their comments have contributed to obtaining a version of the manuscript of higher quality and more understandable for the readers of Applied Science. Replies to your comments have been highlighted in yellow text.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

After some minor correction in abstract and literature review, the paper can be published.

Author Response

The authors appreciate the reviewer's comments. The "Abstract" and "Introduction" sections have been revised and some grammatical errors have been corrected. In the new version of the manuscript, the modifications have been highlighted with gray text.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf