Development of a soil biological quality index  for soils of semi-arid tropics

Aravindh, Selvaraj; Chinnadurai, Chinnappan; Balachandar, Dananjeyan

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-6-483-2020

Articles | Volume 6, issue 2

https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-6-483-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/soil-6-483-2020

© Author(s) 2020. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 6, issue 2

Original research article

|

09 Oct 2020

Original research article |

| 09 Oct 2020

Development of a soil biological quality index for soils of semi-arid tropics

Selvaraj Aravindh, Chinnappan Chinnadurai, and Dananjeyan Balachandar

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Final revised paper (published on 09 Oct 2020)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 29 Oct 2019)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

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

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review MS No.: soil-2019-60', Anonymous Referee #1, 20 Dec 2019
- AC1: 'Reply to Anonymous referee #1 comments', Balachandar Dananjeyan, 11 Jan 2020
RC2: 'Review Comments', Anonymous Referee #2, 24 Dec 2019
- AC2: 'Reply to Anonymous referee #s comments', Balachandar Dananjeyan, 11 Jan 2020

Peer-review completion

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

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (17 Jan 2020) by Carolina Boix-Fayos

AR by Balachandar Dananjeyan on behalf of the Authors (20 Feb 2020)

ED: Revision (09 Mar 2020) by Carolina Boix-Fayos

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (11 Mar 2020) by Carolina Boix-Fayos

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (28 Mar 2020)

ED: Revision (31 Mar 2020) by Carolina Boix-Fayos

AR by Balachandar Dananjeyan on behalf of the Authors (26 Apr 2020)

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (11 May 2020) by Carolina Boix-Fayos

RR by Anonymous Referee #2 (07 Jun 2020)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

I will give the authors credit for attempting to improve the English in this manuscript, they do show an effort was made and so I have reviewed it. However, the manuscript’s English is still a long way from being acceptable for publication in an international journal. The authors have also made many definite scientific improvements from the first version. At this point I leave the English issue up to the editor and the rest of the SOIL processing team to decide how best to deal with it. But it will need to be dealt with.

In section 2.4, I find the formulas for calculating SBQI a bit confusing. The reason is the first SBQI is shown as “SBQI – 1 =”, the second as “SBQI – 2 = “, etc. I think the authors mean the first SBQI, second SBQI, etc. as they write this, but at first I was wondering why the first equation subtracted 1 from the SBQI, the second subtracted 2 from SBQI, etc. I recommend writing these as SBQI1, SBQI1, etc., or something similar, so it does not look like a mathematical operation is taking place on the left side of the equation.

Line 218 – “significantly discriminated against the soils”. I think the authors are saying here that the SBQI-1 method was able to differentiate between soils. Discriminated against carries a negative connotation and I do not think it represents what the authors were trying to say. Same comment in lines 231-232 and other places where this wording occurs.

Line 339 and Line 341 – Both these lines say the 25 farm fields were used for validation, this is repetitive.

Lines 350-356 – None of these issues were tested during the study (or if they were, it was not described in the manuscript). Therefore, this comes across as speculation.

Lines 364-365 – “This method also identifies the constraints of the soil biology better than the other four methods.” I don’t see how this was accomplished in this study. What I see in this study is the idea for a new SBQI, and the tests done showed that this SBQI gives comparable results to other, already established SBQI. Therefore, it appears to be a valid way to determine SBQI. Further research is needed to determine any benefits and drawbacks of this method as compared to other methods.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (12 Jun 2020) by Carolina Boix-Fayos

AR by Balachandar Dananjeyan on behalf of the Authors (21 Jun 2020)

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (03 Jul 2020) by Carolina Boix-Fayos

Dear authors,

Thank you very much again for the submission of your revised manuscript. You accomplished with success the remarks of the referee's, but there are some small language issues that need improvement:

1. I think the title (Development of soil biological quality index for soils of semi-arid tropics) needs an "a" before "soil biological quality index", it would be better as "Development of a soil biological quality index for soils of semi-arid tropics". Could you please check with your native English translator?
2. Can you substitute the “the” of line 10 "the soil quality index" by an “a soil quality index”?
3. In the discussion could you please change the present perfect forms by a simple past forms? Such as:

Line 255 “we have developed” by “we developed”
Line 256 “have chosen” by “chose”
Line 308 “we have adopted” by “we adopted”
Line 311 “we have not picked” “we did not pick”
357 “we have investigated” by “we investigated”

Line 316 “can able” is not correct, can you replace it by “was able”?

4. I am not sure if those sentences are correctly formulated:
Line 317 “ relating to soil functioning” do you mean “and relate it to the soil functioning” ? If that is so, can you change the sentence?

Line 338 “Twenty five farmers’ field in and around…, have assessed, …” I think you mean “….. were assessed…”
Line 355 “these soils may deter their quality ….” change by “the quality of soils may decrease and may be reflected in declining crop productivity”
5. Line 363-364
Can you correct this sentence “as it is with less statistics and a more biological approach” by “as it implies less statistics calculations and it is more based on a biological approach”

Cheers, Carolina

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ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (12 Aug 2020) by Kristof Van Oost (Executive editor)

AR by Balachandar Dananjeyan on behalf of the Authors (15 Aug 2020) Author's response Manuscript

Short summary

Soil quality is important for functioning of the agricultural ecosystem to sustain productivity. It is combination of several physical, chemical, and biological attributes. In the present work, we developed a soil biological quality index, a sub-set of the soil quality index (SBQI) using six important biological variables. These variables were computed from long-term manurial experimental soils and transformed into a unitless 10-scaled SBQI. This will provide constraints of soil processes.