Dear Dr Ferris,

Thank you very much for submitting your manuscript, 'Computational models to improve surveillance for cassava brown streak disease and minimize yield loss.', to PLOS Computational Biology. As with all papers submitted to the journal, yours was fully evaluated by the PLOS Computational Biology editorial team, and in this case, by independent peer reviewers. The reviewers appreciated the attention to an important topic but identified some aspects of the manuscript that should be improved.

We would therefore like to ask you to modify the manuscript according to the review recommendations before we can consider your manuscript for acceptance. Your revisions should address the specific points made by each reviewer and we encourage you to respond to particular issues Please note while forming your response, if your article is accepted, you may have the opportunity to make the peer review history publicly available. The record will include editor decision letters (with reviews) and your responses to reviewer comments. If eligible, we will contact you to opt in or out.

In addition, when you are ready to resubmit, please be prepared to provide the following:

(1) A detailed list of your responses to the review comments and the changes you have made in the manuscript. We require a file of this nature before your manuscript is passed back to the editors.

(2) A copy of your manuscript with the changes highlighted (encouraged). We encourage authors, if possible to show clearly where changes have been made to their manuscript e.g. by highlighting text.

(3) A striking still image to accompany your article (optional). If the image is judged to be suitable by the editors, it may be featured on our website and might be chosen as the issue image for that month. These square, high-quality images should be accompanied by a short caption. Please note as well that there should be no copyright restrictions on the use of the image, so that it can be published under the Open-Access license and be subject only to appropriate attribution.

Before you resubmit your manuscript, please consult our Submission Checklist to ensure your manuscript is formatted correctly for PLOS Computational Biology: http://www.ploscompbiol.org/static/checklist.action. Some key points to remember are:

- Figures uploaded separately as TIFF or EPS files (if you wish, your figures may remain in your main manuscript file in addition).

- Supporting Information uploaded as separate files, titled 'Dataset', 'Figure', 'Table', 'Text', 'Protocol', 'Audio', or 'Video'.

- Funding information in the 'Financial Disclosure' box in the online system.

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. 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 us at figures@plos.org.

We hope to receive your revised manuscript within the next 30 days. If you anticipate any delay in its return, we ask that you let us know the expected resubmission date by email at ploscompbiol@plos.org.

If you have any questions or concerns while you make these revisions, please let us know.

Sincerely,

Konstantin B. Blyuss

Guest Editor

PLOS Computational Biology

Virginia Pitzer

Deputy Editor

PLOS Computational Biology

A link appears below if there are any accompanying review attachments. If you believe any reviews to be missing, please contact ploscompbiol@plos.org immediately:

[LINK]

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Authors:

Please note here if the review is uploaded as an attachment.

Reviewer #1: I believe that this manuscript should be published. I have I believe the topic is relevant and an important investigation of intervention efficacy in a sustainable manner. I believe that this manuscript should be published, however, I have some points I would like to bring the authors attention to:

line 241-247: I found that stating "Increasing the roguing accuracy from low to high also led to a large improvement in the average number of cuttings generated.." slightly misleading. Figure 4 shows modest increases, and the trends in both look to be the same. Looking at the scale, which reflects that increases are by 10k, there isn't a benchmark for me to know if that is indeed a large increase, e.g. if 6000 cuttings creates 1 full additional field, the gains seem modest, unless I have missed something. I would recommend that presenting the information with an appropriate relative scale.

line 266-269: I find that the sentence does not read well and could be better written.

line 297: "...combination of survey variables (surveyor accuracy number of plants surveyed)..." It seems to me there is a missing word within the parentheses.

line 494: is this a negative exponential kernel? The kernel is not described, unless I have missed this. I would like to see this.

For the authors interest in increasing surveillance I would like to bring their attention to the app called Plantix if they have not heard of this before.

https://plantix.net/en/

It has been a very successful diagnostic framework within India for pests and diseases of agricrops. Attempts are under way to use data collected from Plantix to help with detection and prevention of crop losses from pests and diseases. I feel that discussions with the Plantix team would benefit future work for CBSD in West Africa.

Reviewer #2: Dear authors, please find attached two documents of my review. A word document with general comments and an annotated PDF version of the submitted manuscript with detailed comments.

**********

Have all data underlying the figures and results presented in the manuscript been provided?

Large-scale datasets should be made available via a public repository as described in the PLOS Computational Biology data availability policy, and numerical data that underlies graphs or summary statistics should be provided in spreadsheet form as supporting information.

Reviewer #1: No: I could not find a link to the data, perhaps I have missed this?

Reviewer #2: No: Would the authors consider submitting an annotated code of the model?

**********

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: Vincent A. Keenan

Reviewer #2: No

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Review of PCOMPBIOL.docx

Attachment

Submitted filename: PCOMPBIOL-D-19-01812_reviewer_06012020.pdf

Dear Mx. Ferris,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Computational models to improve surveillance for cassava brown streak disease and minimize yield loss.' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Computational Biology.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow up email. A member of our team will be in touch with a set of requests.

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

Should you, your institution's press office or the journal office choose to press release your paper, you will automatically be opted out of early publication. We ask that you notify us now if you or your institution is planning to press release the article. All press must be co-ordinated with PLOS.

Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Computational Biology. 

Best regards,

Konstantin B. Blyuss

Guest Editor

PLOS Computational Biology

Virginia Pitzer

Deputy Editor

PLOS Computational Biology

***********************************************************