Comments to the Author A solid piece of work on drought resistance over the entire life cycle in two important tropical legumes, making proper use of lysimeters, a rainout shelter, a fallow crop and Passioura's conceptual framework for drought phenotyping. Answer: We appreciate the comment I only have a few minor comments: - I am not sure what citation system was used (EndNote?), but there are some inconsistencies with citing of references in the text. E.g. line 53: (Hamidou et al, 2012a); there is no “Hamidou 2012a” nor 2012b in the reference list, so this should be just 2012. Furthermore, the references are not cited in alphabetical order here and there. For example, I could not find Duncan et al, 1978 (Lines 163-164) in the reference list. It would be wise to recheck all citations and references. Answer: Thanks for your comments, now all references problems are checked and fixed - Were the water-stressed plants actually stressed by dehydration? Were physiological tests carried out to determine e.g. plant water status, stomatal conductance, chlorophyll fluorescence / Leaf chlorophyll content, assimilation rate, osmotic adjustment, etc. between well-watered and water-limited plants? Answer: yes water stress was imposed to plants by dehydration (intermittent drought by skipping irrigation). All parameters measured in this study were on well watered and water limited plants. However we did not measure any of the trait the reviewer suggests. - Lines 127-135: I wonder if Transpiration Efficiency between peanut and cowpea in this experiment can be directly compared as the water-limited treatment between the crops was different, i.e. intermittent water availability for peanut and terminal drought for cowpea. Wilting is a sign of severe plant stress, and the peanut plants may not have recovered completely before the next stress cycle. However, it was stated that this intermittent stress was typical for peanut (Line 129: Reference?). Answer: This is a good point but our choice was indeed to apply a treatment that was relevant for each of these crop. Well, the comparison can be made for the WW conditions. For the WS conditions, we could consider that the terminal water stress was one unique cycle of stress imposition, whereas the intermittent water stress could be seen as a succession of several such cycle. The difference between cowpea and peanut is only in the number of such cycle they go through. For that, we still believe the data are comparable. In fact, the specie differences in TE depends mostly on the season. If indeed the way the stress was imposed in the two crop had a major impact on TE, we would not find those season-dependent differences. - Line 128: Why was the water treatment initiated when 50% of the plants had a first flower? I understand the plants first needed to be established for a while, but this needs a reference. Answer: 50% flowering time because, reproductive stage is critical and plants water requirements are high from flowering to maturity. Peanut and cowpea are most sensitive during reproduction phase (flowering to pod filling), than vegetative stage, that’s Crop & Pasture Science ScholarOne Manuscripts https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/csiro-cp?PARAMS=xik_2DDkALf... 1 of 5 16/12/2014 12:48 PM reason why we decided to start stress at 50% flowering stage. Several works showed that peanut (Pallas et al., 1979; Nageswara Rao et al. 1989; Ravindra et al., 1990; Naveen et al.,1992 Rucker et al., 1995) and cowpea (Turk et al.,1980) had most detrimental effects when stress occurred during reproductive stage. Nautiyal et al.1999 found that in peanut, when drought occurred at vegetative phase could increase productivity of peanut. Cowpea had very high survival power when drought occurred at vegetative-stage (Hall, 2004). Therefore, cowpea can be subjected to water stress during the vegetative stage without affecting its final seed yield (Ahmed and Suliman, 2010). - Line 137: Were the cylinders weighed in place (with a load cell for each cylinder) or did each one have to be removed for weighing? Answer: Each cylinder, one by one, was weighed with the same load cell - In this experiment it looks like genotypes (esp. cowpea) that show dehydration avoidance (Lewitt, 1980) by maintaining water uptake (“water spenders”) developing deeper roots to reach available soil water, are more resilient under water-limited conditions. Was root length and spread measured or observed during this experiment? Answer: Root length and spread measurements are destructive aand were therefore not made. At harvest and after imposing terminal drought stress, root length could not be measured with precision because of likely roots degeneration. In addition, these tubes are used as micro-plots, and are then rotated from one experiment to the other, with the idea of not disturbing the soil profile. So, we had no plan to measure any root.