Technical note: A bootstrapped LOESS regression approach for comparing soil
depth profiles

Keith, Aidan M.; Henrys, Peter A.; Rowe, Rebecca L.; McNamara, Niall P.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-3863-2016

Articles | Volume 13, issue 13

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-3863-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-13-3863-2016

© Author(s) 2016. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 13, issue 13

Technical note

|

06 Jul 2016

Technical note |

| 06 Jul 2016

Technical note: A bootstrapped LOESS regression approach for comparing soil depth profiles

Aidan M. Keith, Peter A. Henrys, Rebecca L. Rowe, and Niall P. McNamara

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Final revised paper (published on 06 Jul 2016)
Preprint (discussion started on 04 Dec 2015)

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC C8983: 'Comments of Christopher Poeplau', Christopher Poeplau, 12 Jan 2016
- AC C10123: 'Response to Christopher Poeplau', Aidan Keith, 07 Mar 2016
RC C9600: 'Fail to consider measurement support', Anonymous Referee #3, 09 Feb 2016
- AC C10124: 'Response to referee #3', Aidan Keith, 07 Mar 2016

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

ED: Reconsider after major revisions (17 Mar 2016) by Edzo Veldkamp

AR by Aidan Keith on behalf of the Authors (29 Apr 2016) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (11 May 2016) by Edzo Veldkamp

Dear Dr. Keith,

I have read you revised manuscript and your response to the referee comments. I think you addressed the concerns of the Referees in a good way and the changes that you made improved the manuscript considerably. There are a few minor changes that I suggest that you make:

-I suggest to include Figure 1 as a normal figure and not in the supplementary material. I think the figure is an important illustration and should not be 'hidden' in the Supplement.
-However, you should improve Figure 1: at the moment your 'crosses' are not really recognisable as such. Maybe you can make them larger. In Figure 1D one of the crosses seems to be missing at the lowest Level. Please add a title for your Y axis. You describe figures 1B and D as 'stocks'. However you figures appear to depict cumulative stocks. I am not sure what is the rationale to present the carbon stock in a cumulative way, but it is rather unusual. If there is no specific reason to present the stocks in this way I suggest to present them as normal C stocks. Finally you present standard deviations in your figure, however standard error or 95% confidence intervals are more commonly done, and that is what I suggest to do. For an example how to present carbon stocks and changes with soil depth, I suggest to look at the following paper:

van Straaten, O., M. D. Corre , K. Wolf, M. Tchienkoua, E. Cuellar, R. Matthews, and E. Veldkamp. 2015. Conversion of lowland tropical forests to tree cash crop plantations loses up to one-half of stored soil organic carbon. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 112: 9956-9960. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1504628112.

I look forward to your final revision.

Best regards,

Edzo Veldkamp

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AR by Aidan Keith on behalf of the Authors (25 May 2016)

ED: Publish as is (08 Jun 2016) by Edzo Veldkamp

AR by Aidan Keith on behalf of the Authors (17 Jun 2016)

Short summary

It is important to be able to assess whether changes in land use or management affect soil properties, but testing differences between soil profiles can be challenging. We developed a straightforward approach that makes use of soil core data (which are not spatially independent) to compare soil properties at specific locations down a depth profile. We hope that this approach can be used more widely, based on new or existing data, to examine the impacts of land use and management on soils.