Assessing the Impact of Water Salinization Stress on Biomass Yield of Cardoon Bio-Energetic Crops through Remote Sensing Techniques

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors, 

Please consider the following improvement suggestions 

• Double check Latin expressions for italic  
• Perform a grammar check 
• The BBCH scale is cited out of context + use proper citation (current one isn’t correct) 
• Describe genotypes 
• Add figure of described BBCH stages 
• Improve image quality and sharpness of all figures; make sure text within figures are readable 
• Shift table description before table (not below) 
• Remove table legend from table and transfer to table description 
• All tables and figures have to be understandable on their own; add all abbreviations, units, … to them 
• Explain equation components after presenting the equation 
• Stay cohesive with your spacing e.g. before/after “=”, “<”, “>”, “F- value”... 
• Stay cohesive with capitalization e.g. “F-value”, “p-Value”, “Prob-value”... 
• Only use capitalization or abbreviation if they are a standard term, e.g. “Prob”, “Y for yield” 
• Add table for abbreviations; number of abbreviations is high and therefore hard to follow up 
• Improve conclusions, they only represent a summary of your work and don’t give any practical conclusions or future prospects 

  

Please explain  

• Why you used no repetitions within each plateau 
• Didn’t use a randomization 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors (will be shown to authors):

In the present study, it was investigated if the spectral reflectance responses of three different genotypes of cardoon, subjected at different salinity levels during their growth stages, could be used to suitably estimate the effects on different plant biophysical parameters. The results indicated that reflectance data evaluated in the form of various spectral vegetation indices, demonstrated to be able to discriminate the spectral differences induced on cardoon plants by different water salinization levels, at the different growth stages. Moreover, the red-edge  based indices demonstrated also a good modelling capability of biometric parameters derived from the field data. Below, you will find detailed comments and suggestions on the manuscript that will help to improve the quality of the paper.            

Manuscript style and structure.  

• Satisfactory writing style and English language. Please avoid big sentences (for instance lines 63-67, page 2) and first-person plural throughout the manuscript (for instance line 75 page 2: …we investigated…, line 152 page 4: …In our device…). Please take into consideration the use of “the” (for example: line 61 page 2: …as well as the crop production, line 63 page 2: …or mitigating at the same time…, line 204 page 6: …In the table 1…).
• Very well-organized structure.
• Adequate references and appropriate reference style.
• The statistical treatment is also adequate.

Title and abstract. Both are clear, concise and informative. Maybe it is better the scientific name of cardoon to be written as Cynara cardunculus since it is the first time it is mentioned.

Keywords: I am not sure if ANOVA and Tukey test are necessary keywords.

Introduction. The introduction should briefly place the study in a broad context, highlight its importance and mention the main objectives of the manuscript. Please avoid describing the experiments at this section (as it has been done by line 77 page 2: “Three domesticated cardoon genotypes…” till the end of the paragraph. At this point it is preferable to highlight only the main conclusions of your study and how these add to the current knowledge (significance of the study).

Materials and methods. Here you can add all the necessary information that was removed by the previous section, in order to describe with enough detail the conducted experiments.

Results and Discussion. In this section there is a lot of information and since results are combined with discussion it is important to pay attention on the accurate presentation of Figures and Tables (see below). Some future research directions might also be mentioned in this section.

Figure and Tables. Please consider that all Figures and Tables should have a short but quite explanatory title and caption. For instance, it would be preferable the content of lines 204-206 on page 6 be explained in the caption of Table 1. Similarly, for lines 284-287 on page 8 (caption of Table 2). Thus, please add all the necessary information in all Tables and Figures. In Table 3, 6 and 8, something is wrong with the numbering of the lines and it difficult to read the last column of the tables. Finally, it would be better if the initial letter of figure of table is capitalized when they are mentioned throughout the manuscript.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The submitted manuscript is interesting and current. New methods are used as evaluation criteria. The manuscript is written carefully, without significant transgressions. I have a few remarks and remarks on this manuscript. The abstract is written in a very general way. It is more of a summary. The methodological procedures are described in detail and the actual result part is relatively short, without data. I recommend reworking. The methodology is very detailed, but there is no indication of the type of nutrient solution, possibly the content of nutrients and other physicochemical properties (pH, conductivity, osmotic potential, etc.). The results are described in detail, but statistical evaluation is not always apparent. The results refer to tables and graphs, but the text often lacks specific data. The discussion is adequate.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf