Bone char effects on soil: sequential fractionations and XANES spectroscopy

Morshedizad, Mohsen; Panten, Kerstin; Klysubun, Wantana; Leinweber, Peter

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-4-23-2018

Articles | Volume 4, issue 1

https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-4-23-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-4-23-2018

© Author(s) 2018. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 4, issue 1

Original research article

|

12 Jan 2018

Original research article |

| 12 Jan 2018

Bone char effects on soil: sequential fractionations and XANES spectroscopy

Mohsen Morshedizad, Kerstin Panten, Wantana Klysubun, and Peter Leinweber

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Final revised paper (published on 12 Jan 2018)
Preprint (discussion started on 23 Jun 2017)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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RC1: 'Interactive comment on "Bone char effect on soil: Sequential fractionations and XANES spectroscopy" by Morshedizad et al.', Sander Bruun, 24 Jul 2017
RC2: 'Review', Anonymous Referee #2, 28 Jul 2017
AC1: 'Response to Referees', Peter Leinweber, 30 Aug 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (06 Sep 2017) by Claudio Zaccone

AR by Peter Leinweber on behalf of the Authors (21 Sep 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (22 Sep 2017) by Claudio Zaccone

RR by Sander Bruun (12 Oct 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I believe the authors have addressed the comments from the reviewers in a good way and I only have a few suggestions for improvement before I can recommend that the paper is published.

Line 191-194: Something appears to be wrong with this sentence. I suggest to rewrite to: "All XANES spectral data were baseline corrected in the pre-edge region between 2115–2145 eV and normalized in the post-edge region of 2190–2215 eV. The same ranges were used for the reference P K-edge XANES spectra to achieve consistency in the following fitting analysis (Prietzel et al. 2016)."

In your reponse letter you write "Yes, the LCF analysis was done to achieve the best fit using all possible combinations with at most four P standards between all references. In this case, the outputs of ATHENA were always the same three standards out of all nineteen P reference spectra". This is useful information that should be indicated in the paper maybe even in the table.

Regarding the LCF analysis in Table 5, I still think you need to elaborate a little on the what you can and cannot conclude. Looking at Table 5 some readers may be tempted to conclude that there is no Ca(H2PO4)2 in the control soil and the bonechar treated soil and that there is 14% in the BonecharPlus treated soil. However, it would in my opinion be too much to conclude that. It could very well be another simple calcium phosphate. In line 450 to 451 you write "Besides reducing the AlPO4 and Ca-hydroxyapatite proportions, BCplus particles introduced highly soluble Ca(H2PO4)2 to soils in the incubation-leaching experiment". In such an instance I think you need to help the reader understanding that we are not entirely sure that it is Ca(H2PO4)2, but could be one of a number of other simple calcium phosphates that have a spectrum resembling the one of Ca(H2PO4)2. So please help the readers in these situations.

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ED: Revision (13 Oct 2017) by Claudio Zaccone

AR by Peter Leinweber on behalf of the Authors (19 Oct 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (19 Oct 2017) by Claudio Zaccone

RR by Sander Bruun (26 Oct 2017)

ED: Publish as is (26 Oct 2017) by Claudio Zaccone

ED: Publish as is (14 Nov 2017) by John Quinton (Executive editor)

AR by Peter Leinweber on behalf of the Authors (22 Nov 2017)

Short summary

We investigated how the composition of bone char (BC) particles altered in soil and affected the soil P speciation by fractionation and X-ray absorption near-edge structure spectroscopy. Bone char particles (BC from pyrolysis of bone chips and BC^plus, a BC enriched with S compounds) were collected at the end of incubation-leaching and ryegrass cultivation trials. Soil amendment with BC^plus led to elevated P concentrations and maintained more soluble P species than BC even after ryegrass growth.