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Noble Authors,
One of the three reviewers noted your amendments and stated that he had no further comments. Therefore, your work may be published in its current version - congratulations!
With best regards,
[# PeerJ Staff Note - this decision was reviewed and approved by Richard Schuster, a PeerJ Section Editor covering this Section #]
After the corrections, no comment
after improvement no comment
no comment
After minor revision article should be accepted
Noble Authors,
Three independent experts have carefully analyzed your work. Everyone agreed that your work could be published in PeerJ, but before that, some changes should be made, which were detailed in the reviews. I kindly ask you to read the comments of the reviewers and respond to them.
[# PeerJ Staff Note: Please ensure that all review and editorial comments are addressed in a response letter and any edits or clarifications mentioned in the letter are also inserted into the revised manuscript where appropriate. #]
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Review of the manuscript by Perera et al. “Seeds collected accidentally from semi-natural grasslands as an ad hoc but effective solution for grassland restoration”. (#72060)
Restoring species-rich grasslands is a key topic in conservation in agricultural and urban landscapes. A variety of techniques have been proposed and tested under field conditions. One approach is to collect seeds that remain in mowing machines when cutting species-rich semi-natural grasslands. This seed material can be quite rich in valuable grassland species depending on the community type used for harvesting. In contrast to the transfer of hay from species-rich grasslands, the content of germinable seeds apparently is higher when using this seed generation technique, and the amount of biomass to be transported is lower. This little compact study investigates the germination success of “accidently” collected grassland seeds during a single mowing event in July in pot and field experiments. The results show that, even though the proportion of germinated seeds was comparably low (42 %), a considerable number of characteristic species of species-rich grasslands was restored, and the method thus seems to be applicable in cases, where species-rich grasslands are mown and the hay shall not be used for restoration. The advantage of this approach is primarily the higher species numbers included and the likely higher intraspecific diversity represented by the seeds compared to commercially available seed mixtures. Moreover, it is a cheap approach. Thus, the study seems to add some valuable observations on seed collecting in grassland conservation management.
The experimental design seems to be sound.
Even though the seeds were collected only from a single meadow and during a single moving event, the results are of some interest to conservation managers. The statistical analysis is sound and the data are presented quite well. I agree with most of the authors’ conclusions and recommend publishing after a final linguistic check.
The manuscript is well-written and concise. References are appropriate and well supporting the message.
The results are of high scientific quality.
In general the experiments are well conducted, I found however some issues, which should be clarified:
l141 some additional info would be fine here. For example which type of substrat was used for the sowing (?potting soil? Soil collected from the restoration sites?), and what was the watering regime? How was the sowing executed? Was there a soil covering applied after sowing?
l151-161 – Not clear what are these treatments and why are these important for the sowing experiment?
l192 It is a pity that rototilled but non-sown plots were not established as control for local dispersal and seed banks. It would be nice to see which species were those which were present in the vegetation of the surroundings and also were established in the sown plots (of course they were also sown).
The manuscript covers an important and practice-driven approach and adds information to a so far neglected aspect of grassland restoration.
l46 – maybe “high quality plant material” would be better here
l86 – instead of “employed” use “applied”
l206 These figures for pure seeds are really high – where were 5kg seed material attached to a mover? Some photos would be interesting to see how the experiments were implemented or how this material looks like.
I am not a native English speaker, but the manuscript seems to be written in good English. The problem of the importance of meadows in the environment and the problems associated with their creation have been well described. The list of references includes 33 positions, which seem to cover well the basic knowledge about the research topic. The paper is supplemented by 3 figures and a table. All of them important for the manuscript. The work structure is clear and compliant with PeerJ standards.
The title of the work does not fully correspond to the content. It would be advisable to include in the title that the seeds were harvested during mowing. The word "accidentally" is ambiguous.
The work also requires some editing corrections. Describing the units in which the frequency is represented would be advisable.
Fig. 1B. Lack of b for J20 and M21 for the first week
Fig. 3 in the description (), Fig. 1 [] standardize to be uniform
References format in List of references are different than in the authors' guidelines. Dates in brackets, "&" instead of "and".
The research questions and hypotheses are well formulated. Material and methods are well described, but more information can be added with respect to the seed extraction method. The type of mower should be described in more detail, as not all types of mower will allow you to collect seeds. The quality of the seeds was examined in detail and with the use of appropriate statistical methods.
The supplementary material contains two tables with raw data. The raw data has been compiled clearly and is complete. In table S1, enter the frequency and cover units. There should be a point as the decimal separator in table S2.
The conclusions are properly formulated. The benefits of using seeds collected from the machines are presented, but also the limitations are underlined. It has rightly been suggested that the method may be a valuable addition to the standard methods of creating multi-species meadows.
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