PONE-D-22-23600Cover cropping impacts on soil water and carbon in dryland cropping systemPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Zhang,

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 Dec 30 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Muhammad Riaz

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

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   

2. In your Methods section, please provide additional information regarding the permits you obtained for the work. Please ensure you have included the full name of the authority that approved the field site access and, if no permits were required, a brief statement explaining why.

3. We note that Figure 1 in your submission contain [map/satellite] images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright.

 We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission:

    a. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of 1 to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. 

We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text:

“I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.”

Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an "Other" file with your submission.

In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].”

    b. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only.

The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful:

 USGS National Map Viewer (public domain): http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (public domain): http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/

Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cia-maps-publications/index.html

NASA Earth Observatory (public domain): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/

Landsat: http://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/

USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observatory and Science (EROS) Center) (public domain): http://eros.usgs.gov/#

Natural Earth (public domain): http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript:

“This work has been supported by the Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils whose activities are funded by the Australian Government’s Cooperative Research Centre Program, along with support from both the Queensland Department of Agriculture and Fisheries and the University of Southern Queensland through the Broadacre Cropping Initiative.”

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:

“AG received funding support provided by The Cooperative Research Centre for High Performance Soils (Project No. 2019/4_s.002

https://soilcrc.com.au/) and The Broadacre Cropping Initiative (https://www.unisq.edu.au/research/institutes-centres/ilse/baci).

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.

Additional Editor Comments:

Three reviewers have provided feedback on your manuscript. They have suggested that your manuscript requires revision before further consideration for publication. I invite you to revise your manuscript by giving due considerations to comments and suggestions from reviewers.

[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: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: 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: Cover cropping impacts on soil water and carbon in dryland cropping system is an interetsing study but if authors can suggest how much cover crop will help to incraese soil water and C in dryland cropping system it would be great as numbers ae missing.

Is terminations of summer cover crop practices is common practice ?

Recommenadtions seems not clear as its general please be specific.

Figure quality is also poor.

Reviewer #2: Zhang et al. investigated the effects of replacing conventional fallow period with summer sorghum cover crop and its termination timing in SW QLD on soil water and carbon dynamics, AMF abundance and subsequent winter wheat. The manuscript indicates early termination of summer cover crop improve AMF, soil water accumulation at wheat planting, and wheat grain yield, % protein and WUE. It is quite interesting to figure out how cover cropping can affect soil C cycling, soil water balance and subsequent crop yield in dryland environments. The topic of this manuscript is of interest of the readership of PlosOne, as well as agricultural community at large. However, there are several flaws need to be addressed before the acceptance of the manuscript.

My main comments are:

• The manuscript presented a result of one-year field studies in one location with 5 reps. One of the key features of the dryland cropping system in the SW QLD is high climatic variability (see your statement in line 224 on the extreme weather variability of this region). This study is limited to single year and location and did not capture at least two years of this variability. In addition, while the 5 replications of the experimental treatments could provide an estimate of the variability around the measurements, the authors did not present any measure of error (e.g standard error) around the estimate of the mean (see Fig 3-5, Table 6 for example) of the measured variables. This limits the reproducibility or the relevance of the findings from this manuscript.

• The introduction and the results are very extensive, and the discussion is more general, without going into the effects on the soil that caused a greater or lesser use of N and consequently of the use of water (accumulation of C, nitrification, denitrification, immobilization, etc.), such as for example activity of microorganisms, and their effect on N-mineral transformation in soil? Thus, I believe that some changes should be made to provide a more focused discussion.

• The text in general is very speculative, with a long, repetitive introduction, the material and methods, it needs more information about the herbicide spray, definitions of fertilizers used in the cultures. For e.g what is the composition of the Starter Z (40kg/ha)?

• The authors tried a lot, but the way of personation is still poor. Avoid we, I, you, they, etc. in the manuscript.

• There are extensive citations in the manuscript. In this sense, the manuscript provides a lot of information, but with data that do not add much information relevant to the proposed theme. Overall, the article must be improved with more clarity and a set of information with scientific justification.

• The results and discussion are too long and unwieldy. There is need to streamline it based on the hypothesis of the paper. Many of the figures are repetitive.

Some line-by-line recommendations

L17-18: The practice cover cropping has a limited application to some part of the globe (e.g arid areas or even some areas with unimodal rainfall pattern). May be change to “many part of the globe”

L20: change objectives to ‘objective”

L21: change “different terminations of summer cover crop practices” to “different timing of summer sorghum cover crop termination”

L22: I didn’t see results of interaction. Perhaps it was a mediating effect

L23: remove “planted after a summer sorghum cover crop”

L28-29: “Under late terminated summer cover crop, soil water depleted by 7% at wheat 29 planting which resulted in 61% decline in yield” to ‘Under late terminated summer cover crop, there was 7% soil water depletion at wheat planting which resulted in 61% decline in yield”

L37: soil water retention is different from soil water storage. Paraphrase.

L66: “for increased water used efficiency” or “for increased water use efficiency”

L66: I think the contention that cover cropping has been adopted across the globe is not factually true.

L143: Check GRSP

L164-168: Extensive studies- only 1 cited reference

L179: check “[80] reviewed that an increase”

L226: “2%” hanging

L279: 5.0 cm height of …

L280: remove “height”

L290-294: Describe what was done not what ought to be done

L332: What does the phrase “soil microbial health” means? Perhaps “soil health”

L412: fallow (control) or control… use a consistent phrase for the control treatment.

L420-421: This did not make any sense “There was little difference between control and early termination difference varied across the profile (Figure 3)”

L440-441: This sentence is not necessary” Following the summer cover crop, wheat was planted in plots that were under previous 441 treatments, here we call plots with their treatment name during summer”

L593: The phrase “microbial health” did not make any sense

L952-608: This repetition of the previous section

Reviewer #3: suggestions:

Line 28: ...soil water was depleted by ....

Line 66: ... for increased water use efficiency ...

Line 119: ..., which can be 58-60% of SOM. (delete OC)

Line 239: three months ......

Line 239: Thus, the examined ....

Line 294: is it 20 or 40 tubes?

Line 314: subsamples per plot or per subplot? same for lines 335 and 336.

Lines 552-553: ... contents (TOC, POC and POXC) and clay content (Figure 6).

Lines 579-580: Results also showed that the surface layer 0-15cm stored soil water at wheat ...

Lines 592-593: ... ground cover, organic matter, stored soil water, soil quality, and health.

Lines 595-596: ANOVA test showed the ....

Lines 598-600: ... and increased yield by compared to ...?

Line 600: In this treatment TOC and POC changed by 7% ... (changed? increased or decreased?)

Line 601: ... soil biology as evidenced by an increase ...

Line 603 ... growing season of winter crop showed that managing summer cover ...

Line 604 ... during sensitive phenology stages ... (spelling)

Line 616 ... while enhancing chemical and biological ...

Line 624: ... soil water content at wheat sowing with the control, but enhancements ...

Line 625: ... the increase in yield and grain quality that was observed.

Line 641: However, mid and late-terminated plots ...

Line 688: delete 'could'

Line 724: spelling "concentration'

Line 753: delete 'had'

Line 758: ... affected soil water availability at wheat sowing time.

Lines 761-763: re-write for clarity.

**********

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: Yes: Mukhtar Ahmed

Reviewer #2: Yes: Ismail Ibrahim Garba

Reviewer #3: Yes: Partson Mubvumba, Ph.D.

**********

[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/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: suggestions 10.11.2022.docx

PONE-D-22-23600R1Cover cropping impacts on soil water and carbon in dryland cropping systemPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Zhang,

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 Apr 28 2023 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Muhammad Riaz

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments:

Your revised submission has been assessed. Although the manuscript has been improved during the revision, there are still some issues which need to be addressed as highlighted by our reviewer(s).

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

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 #2: (No Response)

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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: Yes

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 #2: Yes

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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

**********

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 #2: The author has addressed most of the comments raised. Overall, I commended the authors for addressing the key issues. However, I still think the text is too long particularly the introduction section. The authors indicated that because they have looked at different aspects of the cover crop effects, the text has to be this long. This is research manuscript not a review article. However, the same information can be presented with shorter introduction of 5-6 paragraphs. The introduction reported of several long-term cover crop studies on soil water, SOC and indicators of soil health, and readers might think this study will also be a long-term experiment. I recommend the introduction to be shorten, by providing the background on the study, the existing knowledge gap(s) on the subject and the need for the reported study and finally a brief summary of the work and its significance. A total of 94 citations was included in the introduction, and as such the text is unwieldy.

Other minor line by line recommendations:

24: Change "on-farm trials" to "on-farm trial" as it is only one trial.

30: late termination or "late terminated cover crop" Be consistent as you used "early/late terminated" before.

86: reduce rather than "prevent" soil water loss from evapotranspiration. The cover crop must use water even if terminated early.

104: Soil organic material or soil organic matter?

236: Trial site not sites

386-514: Should how the % relative change be described in the data analysis sub-section?

448-449: soil water became similar to other treatments at the flowering stage... How soil become similar to other treatments? Perhaps not significantly different?

567: Incorporation of cover crops into what?

569-583: This is already presented results not discussion. Can be remove.

614-619: did the residue affect wheat emergence in the current study? No results on establishment count?

726: POC or POXC?

Reviewer #3: This study shows well how cover crop terminating timing plays an important role in managing soil water storage and yields under dryland cropping systems. The study also tracks how chemical and biological indicators (TOC, POC, AMF sequence concentration, and microbial activities) tie up together in enhancing soil health. This study is particularly important in that it highlights the importance of cover crops under dryland conditions in semi-arid areas, where generally farmers are skeptical about cover crop adoption based on the idea of saving moisture for the main crop. Well-managed cover crops in semi-arid dryland are potentially more beneficial than elsewhere where precipitation is in abundance.

**********

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 #2: Yes: Ismail Ibrahim Garba

Reviewer #3: Yes: Partson Mubvumba

**********

[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/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Cover cropping impacts on soil water and carbon in dryland cropping system

PONE-D-22-23600R2

Dear Dr. Zhang,

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,

Muhammad Riaz

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

I am pleased to inform you that your revised manuscript is accepted for publication.

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 #2: 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 #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #2: 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 #2: 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 #2: 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 #2: The authors have addressed all the recommendations. The manuscript can be accepted in the revised form.

**********

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 #2: Yes: Ismail Ibrahim Garba

**********