Phone App to Perform Quality Control of Pesticide Spray Applications in Field Crops

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Reviewer's opinion about MS entitled “Phone app to perform quality control of pesticide spray applications in field crops”.

General comments:

This manuscript reports on the practical utilization of a phone application in order to optimize the spray of pesticides. The main advantage of the displayed research is its analytical aspects, which are able to point out the features of some side-effects of pesticides technologies. In my opinion, the results of this work will be unequivocally contributed to the realization of environmentally friendly technologies.

The separated subsections should be divided in the introduction, as well as in the whole manuscript. This structural division can help for easier visibility.

Specific remarks.

line 28-32. The other application possibilities should be discussed in this part of the introduction. First of all, I mean drone spraying, of which legislation rules will be formed in several European countries at the present time because aerial pesticide spraying has come under significant tightening in the European Union.

line 38-47. You should briefly emphasize the main hypothesis, which motivated your experimental work.

I think so, that the importance of wholly pesticide coverage should be better emphasized, especially in the case of contact active ingredients, for instance, the pyrethroids. The significance of this is to be found in the protection difficulties of the hidden lifestyle pests [e.g. Sci. Agric. Bohem., 50(4):236-243.].

You should take care of the unified letter size (such as in line 164).

Consider the other RGB analytical studies [e.g. IEEE Contr. Sys. Grad. Res. Coll. 2012, 382-385.] too - if possible – and compare with your applicability and your achieved results

Review the whole manuscript, because several typing errors can be found. Please revise them!

Is there any juristic relationship between the authors and the owner group of the Smart Spray application? In my mind, the authors need to clarify the possible conflict of interest or professional interest.

The content of the final comments section is somewhat insufficient – you need to discuss all your findings properly, also the limitations of the method, and the broader scientific context of what your results mean to the current knowledge. An important task, that your main findings should compare with the results of the related literature sources, and at the same time you should give a recommendation for the next practical applications.

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Author Response

Please, see attached.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript by Christian Nansen and coworkers shows a demonstration of a phone app, named “Smart Spray” (for both iOS and Android), for relative quantification of pesticide spray application in field crops based on water sensitive spray cards. According to the authors, the app has the potential to maximize the performance of pesticide sprays, which could help in avoiding loss and saving amount of pesticide on crop fields. The scope of the study is interesting and necessary. My only concern with this work is how and in what scenario the Smart Spray app would be competitively different from other established apps used for pesticide spray detection.  Please check these few comments below:

- (Figure 1) It seems that the authors forgot to point out and discuss the part B of the figure in the caption. Please check this.

 

-Please check for typos throughout the manuscript. An example is “scopr” (page 2, line 38), but others can be found throughout the manuscript.

Author Response

Please, see attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

In this paper, the authors develop a smartphone app, “Smart Spray”, for quantifying the spray coverage and evaluating the spray deposition quality in the field crops based on the water sensitive spray cards. It’s a very interesting topic for pesticide spraying and also meaningful for maximizing the spray performance with a minimum of pesticides. The comments are below:

1. In the field test, the overlapping droplets always occur on the water sensitive cards. It’s very difficult to distinguish the coalesced or overlapping droplets by the image identification process, thus affecting the results of deposition coverage and droplet number on the target surface. So, how to address this problem in this app?
2. The effect of the atmospheric conditions was considered in the calculation algorithm of spray coverage. And it has the Humidity Filter button in the user interface. How to quantitively evaluate the effect of humidity on the water sensitive spray cards? Besides the card color, is there an approximate criterion of the atmospheric parameters to decide the Humidity Filter? The range of the Humidity is recommended to add when the Humidity filter is open.
3. Line 201~234: The authors did not clearly interpret the classification of spray performance according to the spray coverage obtained by this app.
4. The software “DepositScan”, developed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), is widely used for analyzing the spray coverage on the water sensitive spray cards. What are the differences between this two software? And how about is the accuracy of “Smart Spray” compared with the “DepositScan”?
5. Spell check is required. For example, Line 38, Line 75.

Author Response

Please, see attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

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.