Dear Dr. Ahmed,

After thorough evaluation of both referee reports and your response to each of them, your manuscript will be reconsidered for publication after major revisions. I advise you to carefully follow the recommendations of both referees. Both point to the lengthy historical overviews, too many aspects being covered, and not enough focus on current and promising future approaches. The paper in its current form reads too much as a review of reviews and therefore lacks in novelty. The historical overview should be shortened and can greatly benefit from a summary table listing the different methods with their pros and cons as suggested by Referee 1. The paper needs to provide a stronger take-home message, highlighting the most important developments in this field as well as their implications for nematode taxonomy, ecology and practical applications.

I believe addressing these comments will greatly improve the manuscript.
I look forward to seeing your revisions.
Regards
Karolien Denef

Dear Dr. Ahmed,
You significantly modified your manuscript paying close attention to the comments and suggestions made by the two reviewers. I'm pleased to see many of the historical methods sections reduced and the addition of the summary tables. The manuscript greatly improved in doing so. I would advise you to closely check the manuscript for grammatical errors. In several sentences, there were some incorrect verb conjugations (mostly singular where it should be plural).
Thank you.
Kind regards,
Karolien Denef

Dear Dr Ahmed,
Please make sure that all grammatical errors are corrected as requested by the Topical Editor before publication of the manuscript.

We thank you for choosing SOIL!