About the Authors

Martina G. Vijver

vijver@cml.leidenuniv.nl

Affiliation Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

Paul J. van den Brink

Affiliations Alterra, Wageningen University and Research centre, Wageningen, The Netherlands, Wageningen University, Wageningen University and Research centre, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Competing Interests

For transparency reasons, we mentioning the following: PvdB's chair was cofunded between 2008 and 2011 by the following pesticide producers, Bayer, which produces imidacloprid and Syngenta. We feel that this cofunding provides no compete of interest since we don't claim that imidacloprid poses less risks or toxicity than stated in the Van Dijk et al. (2013) as in the current paper we only criticized their methodology. This does not alter our adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials. This current work has not been funded. Sponsors thus had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: MGV PJB. Performed the experiments: MGV PJB. Analyzed the data: MGV PJB. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: MGV PJB. Wrote the paper: MGV PJB.