Soil acidity and fertility status of surface soils under different land uses in Sayo district of Oromia, western Ethiopia

Abu Regasa; Wassie Haile; Girma Abera

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0316009

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionJune 7, 2024
10 Sep 2024 Decision Letter - Muhammad Nauman Ahmad, Editor PONE-D-24-23222Soil Acidity and Fertility Status of Surface Soils under Different Land Uses in Sayo District of Oromia, Western EthiopiaPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Regasa, 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 Oct 25 2024 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. 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. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: “The authors are thankful to Dambi Dollo University College of Agriculture and Natural Resource and Hawassa University School of Plant and Horticultural Science for their support in financing. 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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/ [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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: No ****** 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: 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 ****** 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: • In the abstract section, there is editorial error and repletion of words that make not encourage reader to read the full article. • Introduction part is shallow and unable to describe the research gaps and do not shows the problem of conversion of forest land to other LUT. • The manuscript contains a lot of editorial errors such as poor grammar, punctuation and coherence Please correct it accordingly. • The ANOVA table should be presented with the appropriate source of variation. • The results, discussion and conclusion sections are poor, not properly interpreted and justified. • The critical value of all soil nutrients should be discussed based on the critical value each individual. • Please correct the subtitle only uppercase the first keyword. ****** 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: Ewunetie Melak ******** [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. 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Revision 1
6 Nov 2024 Author Response College of Agriculture and Natural Resource Dambi Dollo University Dambi Dollo City, Ethiopia Dear reviewers and Editor, We are thankful for your kind comments on our manuscript entitled “Soil acidity and fertility status of surface soils under different land uses in Sayo district of Oromia, western Ethiopia” following our submission for publication in PLOSE ONE journal. We have re-looked at the manuscript and changed it in line with your comments as follows. We have incorporated your comments on the abstract and revised it to enhance its attractiveness. Based on your suggestions, we revised the introduction, including the statement of the problem by clearly setting the research gap. Also, we added several new sentences to improve the strength of the introduction. There were no changes made to the materials and methods section, as we did not receive any recommendations regarding the use of specific statistical methods. Therefore, we decided to continue with the methods previously employed unless further suggestions are provided. In response to your comments, we revised the results and discussion sections, ensuring the interpretation aligns with our findings and is supported by recent literature. Additionally, we have corrected grammatical and technical errors to ensure consistency throughout the discussion. Finally, we have modified the conclusion part of the manuscript by providing your constructive comments. For the editor, the majority of your comments were based on the author's instructions, thus we took all necessary steps to improve the manuscript. Overall, what we want to inform you by using this opportunity is that we updated, rephrased and changed more than half of the manuscript. We respectfully request that you consider this modified text for publication. Sincerely, Abu Regasa (PhD candidate) Dambi Dollo University On behalf of all authors Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316009.r002
25 Nov 2024 Decision Letter - Dafeng Hui, Editor PONE-D-24-23222R1Soil Acidity and Fertility Status of Surface Soils under Different Land Uses in Sayo District of Oromia, Western EthiopiaPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Regasa, 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 Jan 09 2025 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, Dafeng Hui, Ph.D. 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: Associate Editor: The manuscript has been evaluated by the previous reviewer who still has some technical concerns. For example, the ANOVA results were not presented in the main text. I noticed the ANOVA results in supplemental Excel files, but the results need to be summarized and included in one table, or add the information (F and significance) to Tables 1 to 3. A few other editorial issues were found that need to be addresses: 1) grazing should be grazing grassland in several places. Grazing is not a land use type. Add plantation or land after eucalyptus in the abstract (Page 1, line 6). 2) Page 2, 2 paragraph: Delete "But," and start with "Despite these ..." 3) Page 3, the last paragraph: Too much arguments were given but not enough information for the present study. Please add specific objectives or scientific hypotheses here. 4) Page 5, Site selection and soil sampling: how ere natural forest land defined? 5) Page 7, Statistical analysis: physiochemical here and many other places. physiochemical should be changed physicochemical. 7) Page 7, Results and Discussions: change discussions to discussion. 8) Page 8, 2nd paragraph: change to "The results of ANOVA showed that ...". Please also define ANOVA when first time mention in the Data analysis. [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 #1: (No Response) ******** 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 #1: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 #1: 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 #1: 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 #1: Dear authors: I am happy for most issues are corrected accordingly, but still you mentioned based on ANOVA results. As you state from your manuscript there is no ANOVA table. you have two option, one is to delete the mention of ANOVA from your manuscript , two is to add ANOVA table from your manuscript. ****** 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 #1: Yes: Ewunetie Melak ******** [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. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316009.r003
Revision 2
3 Dec 2024 Author Response Dear Reviewers and Editor, We would like to express our gratitude for your constructive comments and suggestions on our manuscript entitled “Soil Acidity and Fertility Status of Surface Soils under Different Land Uses in Sayo District of Oromia, Western Ethiopia” submitted for publication in PLOS ONE. Following your feedback, we have thoroughly revised the manuscript to address the points raised, as detailed below: Journal Requirements and References: We have addressed the comment regarding retracted articles by removing them from our references. In addition, we have replaced the preprint reference: Regasa A. Conversion in Land Use Change Soil Physiochemical Properties in the Highland of Western Ethiopia, 29 September 2023, PREPRINT (Version 1) available at Research Square [https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3371625/v1]. 2023 with alternative and more suitable citations. We have included one unpublished dataset titled “Kellem Wolega Zone Agriculture and Natural Resource Office. Description of Kellem Wolega Zone Dambi Dollo City, Oromia; 2022” to provide local and contextual data relevant to our analysis. Supplementary Materials: In line with your suggestion, we have combined the supplementary materials into a single table (S2 Table). This ensures clarity and better alignment with journal requirements. Statistical Reporting: We have updated Tables 1, 2, and 3 by including F-values and significance levels, enhancing the statistical robustness and transparency of our findings. Editorial Issues: All highlighted editorial issues have been addressed. For instance, we revised the final paragraph of page 3 to clearly articulate the specific objectives of the study, improving clarity and coherence. Site Selection and Soil Sampling: We have expanded the discussion of site selection and soil sampling methods by providing detailed descriptions of all land use types, including natural forest land. This addition ensures a more comprehensive understanding of the study context. We respectfully request that the revised manuscript be considered for publication. We are confident that these revisions address the concerns raised and contribute to improving the quality of the manuscript. Thank you for your time and valuable input, and we look forward to your decision. Sincerely, Abu Regasa (PhD candidate) Dambi Dollo University On behalf of all authors Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316009.r004
4 Dec 2024 Decision Letter - Dafeng Hui, Editor Soil Acidity and Fertility Status of Surface Soils under Different Land Uses in Sayo District of Oromia, Western Ethiopia PONE-D-24-23222R2 Dear Dr. Regasa, 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 will be generated when your article is formally accepted. Please note, if your institution has a publishing partnership with PLOS and your article meets the relevant criteria, all or part of your publication costs will be covered. Please make sure your user information is up-to-date by logging into Editorial Manager at Editorial Manager® and clicking the ‘Update My Information' link at the top of the page. If you have any questions relating to publication charges, 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, Dafeng Hui, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316009.r005
Formally Accepted
12 Dec 2024 Acceptance Letter - Dafeng Hui, Editor PONE-D-24-23222R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Regasa, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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 customercare@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. Dafeng Hui Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0316009.r006

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