Increased Diversity of Rhizosphere Bacterial Community Confers Adaptability to Coastal Environment for Sapium sebiferum Trees
, Yajun Chang 2, Linhe Sun 2, Jinfeng Li 2 and Dongrui Yao 1,2,*Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article is well writen, methods apropiate, but the I have few comments in discussion section, mainly regarding the influence of bacterial communitie in tree addaptation to costal environment. Plaese see comments on the manuscript.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
In general, we are grateful to the comments. The suggestions on the manuscript are very constructive and helpful.
POINT 1: In costal field grown trees of forest trees? Please clarify.
Response 1: As suggested, we clarified the information, “all the costal and nursery rhizospheric soil samples”, please check line 18.
POINT 2: Which mechanism? It is not mentioned!
RESPONSE 2: Thank you for suggestion. It refers to the “tree-microbe interactions”. The sentence has been corrected. Please check line 29.
POINT 3: based on
RESPONSE 3: Thanks for reminding. The words have been corrected. Please check line 140.
POINT 4: delete repetitive “after”
RESPONSE 4: we deleted the “after” as suggested, Please check line 141.
POINT 5: again, please clarify it is costal tree or forest tree or both
RESPONSE 5: we clarified the information, “in all the costal and nursery rhizospheric samples”. Please check line 150.
POINT 6: this figure is difficult to follow, it is not clear enough. Please show on figure or legend which one is for phylum and which is for genera, because it cannot be seen on the figure.
RESPONSE 6: We attached the original figures to editor. We added ‘a,b’ to distinguish, figure 6a is for phylum, figure 6b is for genera. Please check the figure 7.
POINT 7: How do you know that tress from coastal environment adapted by increasing the community diversity? In my opinion the community is influenced mainly by salt environment and partially by the root secretions. In the paper are not shown results about the physiological parameters, in order to demonstrate that coastal trees are better adapted than forest trees. Moreover, due to the permanent washing of the zone with the freshwater, the soil salinity is fluctuation continuously.
RESPONSE 7: The sentence was rewritten. In order to make the expression more accurate, we rewrote the sentence as ‘Moreover, the results suggested that certain species of bacteria phyla were only found in costal rhizosphere soils, probably depending on saline environmental forces, and also on positive or negative interactions between the root of S. sebiferum trees and the microbial groups’. Please check line 308-314.
POINT 8: I am not sure if the diversity could be improved in such particular environment. In my opinion, the soil parameters select the microorganisms and most probably the diversity could be changed just in low range.
RESPONSE 8: We agree with the reviewers. The current results may not support the conclusion, so this sentence was deleted, please check line 308-314.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Xiaojing Liu et al. submitted the manuscript for publication as an original article in the MDPI journal Forests. The manuscript ID forests-1654584 entitled “Increased diversity of rhizosphere bacterial community confers adaptability to costal environment for Sapium sebiferum trees” provides a new dataset, and these results may be of interest to the readership of the Forests journal.
Overall, the experimental design and data analysis are appropriate, and the introduction and discussion are consistent enough. However, I am asking the authors to read the work again and remove all punctuation errors and to improve the quality of Figs. 6, 7 and 8.
Author Response
We checked the MS carefully, and removed the punctuation errors. We attached the original figures to editor.Please see the attachment of revised MS. Thank you for your suggestion.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
