Effect of irrigation with treated wastewater on bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers.) production and soil characteristics and estimation of plant nutritional input

Mario Licata; Davide Farruggia; Nicolò Iacuzzi; Claudio Leto; Teresa Tuttolomondo; Giuseppe Di Miceli

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0271481

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 29, 2022
11 May 2022 Decision Letter - Vassilis G. Aschonitis, Editor PONE-D-22-09242Irrigation with treated wastewater affects biomass production of bermudagrass and reduces the need for plant nutrientsPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Iacuzzi, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 25 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. 2. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: [The authors would like to thank the Sicilian Regional Ministry of Food and Agricultural Resources, the Corissia Research Centre and the University of Palermo for having provided the funds for the study. A special thanks also goes to Branwen Hornsby for her continuing support to the research and linguistic contribution.] We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: [The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.] Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 5. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: Reviewer comments The manuscript entitled ‘Irrigation with treated wastewater affects biomass production of bermudagrass and reduces the need for plant nutrients’ is an interesting research work. The article is not well organized with robust bibliography which consists of enough data and enough scientific fundamental conceptualization. The article is not suitable for publication in PLOSONE. • Title of the manuscript need to be improved. In the present form it appears as the statement. Authors may consider inclusion of scientific name of bermudagrass in brackets (). • Authors are advised to reduce the data values (large values) to single decimal place throughout the manuscript. In abstract, please check, …….29.00 kg P ha-1 year-1, I think should be K rather than P???? • Authors have written several abbreviations e.g. BOD, COD, TN, TP etc, which needs to written in full at their first appearance in the text. • In abstract authors have written that soil salinity increased significantly…., they need to highlight the statistical significance e.g. p<0.05 or p<0.01. • The introduction has citation of 32 references, of which only 5-6 references are latest one (work published after 2019). Authors are advised to cite recent references. • The major drawback of the introduction section is the lack of state-of the art of the research works and its connection with the problem formulation, research objectives and the hypothesis. Authors should critically work on that. • Authors need to specify the amount of wastewater for irrigation per hectare area or number of irrigations to be given with wastewater per annum. It is written in conclusion that application of TWW irrigation in medium-term leads to increase in bermudagrass turf biomass yields. Clarify in conclusion what does medium term means. Conclusion must be clear. • Figure 1 and 2 are needless. • The quality of figures 4 and 5 is very bad. It is difficult to read the legends. • Figure 6 lacks statistical analysis Reviewer #2: Respected authors Following are the comments please consider them 1) Topic- Make title in more questionable way. Your title looks conclusive as it concludes the results in it. Suggestion- Effect of treated wastewater irrigation on soil properties and bermuda grass production. 2) otherwise manuscript is well constructed and written in beautiful manner ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes:** Harmandeep Singh Chahal [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. 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Revision 1
31 May 2022 Author Response Revision notes Ms. Ref. No.: PONE-S-22-11993 In response to Ms. Ref. No.: PONE-S-22-11993 we followed all the recommendations which were made by the editor and reviewers. Editor’s comments Point 1: Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf. Response: the authors confirm that the manuscripts meets PLOS ONE’s style requirement. They have used the PLOS ONE templates, found at links suggested by the Editor. Point 2: We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. Response: the authors have provided the correct grant number for the awards we received in our study in the “Funding Information” section, as suggested by the Editor. At this stage, they cannot include the grant information also in the “Financial Disclosure” due to fact that they cannot view it in the submission platform of Plos One. If you want, you could kindly insert this information in the Financial Disclosure as the following: Title of the project: Tecnologie innovative per l'impiego di acque "non convenzionali" e prevenzione della desertificazione. Grant numbers D71D04000000008 Full name of the funder: Ministry of Agriculture, Rural Development and Mediterranean Fisheries of Sicilian Region Point 3: Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: [The authors would like to thank the Sicilian Regional Ministry of Food and Agricultural Resources, the Corissia Research Centre and the University of Palermo for having provided the funds for the study. A special thanks also goes to Branwen Hornsby for her continuing support to the research and linguistic contribution.] We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: [The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.] Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. Response: the authors have removed any funding-related text from the manuscript, as suggested by the Editor. Furthermore, the authors have included the amended statements within the cover letter. Point 4: We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. Response: the authors agree with the Editor’s comment. They have uploaded a minimal data sets which underline the results more relevant in the manuscript as Supporting Information files, as requested by the Journal (all relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files). Point 5: We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. Response: the authors agree with the Editor’s comment. They have decided to remove the phrase that refers to these data. Reviewer #1 In response to Ms. Ref. No.: PONE-S-22-11993 Reviewer #1, we tried to follow nearly all of his/her recommendations. Here is a point by point summary of the actions taken in response to the reviewer’s comments. Point 1: The manuscript entitled ‘Irrigation with treated wastewater affects biomass production of bermudagrass and reduces the need for plant nutrients’ is an interesting research work. The article is not well organized with robust bibliography which consists of enough data and enough scientific fundamental conceptualization. The article is not suitable for publication in PLOSONE. Response: the authors appreciate and thank the reviewer for his/her comments. They have improved the manuscript following the suggestions of the reviewer. Point 2: Title of the manuscript need to be improved. In the present form it appears as the statement. Authors may consider inclusion of scientific name of bermudagrass in brackets (). Response: the authors agree with the reviewer’s consideration They have changed the title of the manuscript and included the scientific name of bermudagrass in brackets, as suggested by the reviewer. Point 3: Authors are advised to reduce the data values (large values) to single decimal place throughout the manuscript. In abstract, please check, …….29.00 kg P ha-1 year-1, I think should be K rather than P???? Response: the authors have reduced the large data values (values above 10) to single decimal place as suggested by the reviewer. They apologize with him/her for having written P instead of K in the abstract; then, they have made a small correction. Point 4: Authors have written several abbreviations e.g. BOD, COD, TN, TP etc, which needs to written in full at their first appearance in the text. Response: the authors agree with the reviewer’s observation. They have written BOD, COD, TN, TP etc, in full at their first appearance in the text, as suggested by the reviewer. Point 5: In abstract authors have written that soil salinity increased significantly…., they need to highlight the statistical significance e.g. p<0.05 or p<0.01. Response: the authors have highlighted the statistical significance (p<0.01) in the abstract, as suggested by the reviewer. Point 6: The introduction has citation of 32 references, of which only 5-6 references are latest one (work published after 2019). Authors are advised to cite recent references. Response: the authors agree with the reviewer’s observation. They have added new references and cited recent references (where possible), as suggested by the reviewer. Point 7: The major drawback of the introduction section is the lack of state-of the art of the research works and its connection with the problem formulation, research objectives and the hypothesis. Authors should critically work on that. Response: the authors thank the reviewer for his/her constructive comment. They have improved the introduction, added references in order to highlight the state of the art of the research topic and included the hypothesis. Point 8: Authors need to specify the amount of wastewater for irrigation per hectare area or number of irrigations to be given with wastewater per annum. It is written in conclusion that application of TWW irrigation in medium-term leads to increase in bermudagrass turf biomass yields. Clarify in conclusion what does medium term means. Conclusion must be clear. Response: the authors agree with the reviewer’s comment. They have specified in the manuscript the amount of treated wastewater for irrigation per hectare area, as suggested by the reviewer. Concerning the number of irrigations to be given with treated wastewater per year, they had already provided this information in the first version of the manuscript (…in 2016-2018, irrigation was applied from May to September three times per week, on average, both with FW and TWW..). Furthermore, they have clarified in the conclusions what medium term means: it is a time interval between two and ten years, as many researchers intend. Point 9: Figure 1 and 2 are needless. Response: the authors have deleted the figures 1 and 2 from the manuscript, as suggested by the reviewer. Point 10: the quality of figures 4 and 5 is very bad. It is difficult to read the legends. Response: the authors have improved the quality of figures 4 and 5 and increased the character of the legends in order to make them more readable, as suggested by the reviewer. The image resolution of the two figures is now 600 dpi. I kindly advise the reviewer that the quality of the image could deteriorate due to the transformation from TIF to PDF. I hope the reviewer understand this observation. Point 11: Figure 6 lacks statistical analysis Response: the authors highlight that, in the case of figure 6, they did not carry out the analysis of the variance but they analysed the variability of data using standard deviation calculation. In Figure 6, the bars of standard deviation are, in fact, showed. The authors have deleted “significantly” from the text in the paragraph (to avoid any confusion) concerning Figure 6. Reviewer #2 In response to Ms. Ref. No.: PONE-S-22-11993 Reviewer #2, we tried to follow nearly all of his/her recommendations. Here is a point by point summary of the actions taken in response to the reviewer’s comments. Point 1: Topic- Make title in more questionable way. Your title looks conclusive as it concludes the results in it. Suggestion- Effect of treated wastewater irrigation on soil properties and bermudagrass production. Response: the authors agree with the reviewer’s consideration. They have changed the title of the manuscript, as suggested by the reviewer. Point 2: otherwise manuscript is well constructed and written in beautiful manner Response: the authors appreciate and thank the reviewer for his/her comments. We hope the editorial board will agree on the interest of this study. Sincerely yours, Nicolò Iacuzzi on behalf of the authors. Corresponding author: Dr Nicolò Iacuzzi, Department of Agricultural, Food and Forest Sciences, Università degli Studi di Palermo, Viale delle Scienze 13 Building 4, 90128 Palermo, Italy. E-mail: nicolo.iacuzzi@unipa.it Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271481.r002
5 Jul 2022 Decision Letter - Vassilis G. Aschonitis, Editor Effect of irrigation with treated wastewater on bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers.) production and soil characteristics and estimation of plant nutritional input PONE-D-22-09242R1 Dear Dr. Iacuzzi, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Vassilis G. Aschonitis Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation. Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed ******** 2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #3: Yes ****** 6. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #3: All the corrections have been done. All the comments have been answered. The manuscript can be pubblished. No further comments ****** 7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #3: No ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271481.r003
Formally Accepted
7 Jul 2022 Acceptance Letter - Vassilis G. Aschonitis, Editor PONE-D-22-09242R1 Effect of irrigation with treated wastewater on bermudagrass (Cynodon dactylon (L.) Pers.) production and soil characteristics and estimation of plant nutritional input Dear Dr. Iacuzzi: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Vassilis G. Aschonitis Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271481.r004

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