Testing the causal mechanism of the peninsular effect in passerine birds from South Korea

Jin-Yong Kim; Man-Seok Shin; Changwan Seo; Soo Hyung Eo; Seungbum Hong

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0245958

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionSeptember 16, 2020
15 Dec 2020 Decision Letter - Bi-Song Yue, Editor PONE-D-20-29245 Testing the causal mechanism of the peninsular effect in passerine birds from South Korea PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Hong, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 10 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. 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Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: The data could be uploaded in a table form per cell in a depository, the referred site is in Korean and it is hard for us to see. The results need more explicit description in the text to be able to follow the findings. Reviewer #2: Kim et al. peninsular effect I like this paper very much. The peninsular effect is a fascinating one because it tells so much about the causes of species richness. When those peninsulas face southwards (in the northern hemisphere) then the declining species richness towards the tip runs counter to the large scale patterns of increasing diversity at lower latitudes. This is what this paper finds. Of course, one has to factor out the potentially confounding factors. I think the authors do that very well. I particularly enjoyed their figures that so clearly articulate the different hypotheses that they compare. We understand that we will not get surveys from the northern part of the peninsula — for “political reasons” as the authors put it. Having been able to look southwards into North Korea from China (and across the border from Russia), I wonder if they authors might look at the diversity in China’s Amur tiger Amur leopard national park for a comparison of its richness. Which species present there are missing from South Korea? Doing this is not a criterion for publication, incidentally, just something the authors might consider. One minor quibble The single model of passerine species richness showed the increasing pattern of species richness with increasing latitude in South Korea. Mean temperature induced by latitude gradient negatively affected LAI and forest area, and positively habitat diversity. However, passerine species richness was only influenced by mean temperature and forest area. Expressions such as “negatively affected” are hard to understand. So, too, are using acronyms, such as LAI. A better way to write this paragraph would be The single model of passerine species richness showed species richness increased with latitude in South Korea. Mean temperature increased with decreasing latitude, as did habitat diversity but leaf area index and forest area decline. However, mean temperature and forest area only influenced passerine species richness. Comparable examples occur throughout. ****** 6. 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: No Reviewer #2: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] 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. Registration is free. 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 PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245958.r001
Revision 1
3 Jan 2021 Author Response To editor [Commments] In your revised cover letter, please address the following prompts: a) If there are ethical or legal restrictions on sharing a de-identified data set, please explain them in detail (e.g., data contain potentially sensitive information, data are owned by a third-party organization, etc.) and who has imposed them (e.g., an ethics committee). Please also provide contact information for a data access committee, ethics committee, or other institutional body to which data requests may be sent. b) If there are no restrictions, please upload the minimal anonymized data set necessary to replicate your study findings as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and provide us with the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. We will update your Data Availability statement on your behalf to reflect the information you provide. [Response] Thanks you for your contribution to this journal as an editor. We’ve checked the manuscript formats and added sentences explaining ethical and legal things in our cover letter. [Commnents] We note that Figures 2, 3, 4 in your submission contain map images which may be copyrighted. All PLOS content is published under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which means that the manuscript, images, and Supporting Information files will be freely available online, and any third party is permitted to access, download, copy, distribute, and use these materials in any way, even commercially, with proper attribution. For these reasons, we cannot publish previously copyrighted maps or satellite images created using proprietary data, such as Google software (Google Maps, Street View, and Earth). For more information, see our copyright guidelines: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/licenses-and-copyright. [Response] All of these figures (2,3,4) were the ones that we drew by ourselves using the original source data. For example, we obtained bird observation data from the data provider (website: http://ecobank.nie.re.kr), and then we drew the bird richness map (fig 4). Survey region map(fig2) and land cover map(fig3) were also drawn by ourselves. To reviewer #1 [Comments] Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? No [Response] We made and added more information of our results in supplementary 2 and 3 files. And our raw data was uploaded when we upload revision files (raw data, excel file). [Comments] The data could be uploaded in a table form per cell in a depository, the referred site is in Korean and it is hard for us to see. The results need more explicit description in the text to be able to follow the findings. [Response] Thanks for your contribution to this paper for reviewer. More information about results of fig.4 and 5 were added in supplementary 2 and 3 files. These results were uploaded in a table form as you recommend (Table S2 and S3). And our raw data was uploaded when we upload revision files (raw data, excel file). And we will ask to make it possible in English for chief of the department proving the web site. Also, we modified parts of abstract and conclusion to make the smooth flow between results and conclusion (line no. 28~44, 291~309). To reviewer #2 [Comments] I like this paper very much. The peninsular effect is a fascinating one because it tells so much about the causes of species richness. When those peninsulas face southwards (in the northern hemisphere) then the declining species richness towards the tip runs counter to the large scale patterns of increasing diversity at lower latitudes. This is what this paper finds. Of course, one has to factor out the potentially confounding factors. [Response] Thanks for your contribution to this paper for reviewer. We highlighted our finding in abstract and conclusion section (line no. 38~40, 304~306) as you recommended. [Comments] I think the authors do that very well. I particularly enjoyed their figures that so clearly articulate the different hypotheses that they compare. We understand that we will not get surveys from the northern part of the peninsula — for “political reasons” as the authors put it. Having been able to look southwards into North Korea from China (and across the border from Russia), I wonder if they authors might look at the diversity in China’s Amur tiger Amur leopard national park for a comparison of its richness. Which species present there are missing from South Korea? Doing this is not a criterion for publication, incidentally, just something the authors might consider. [Response] As far as we know, Amur tiger and Amur leopard were presumed extinct in the Korean peninsula in early 20th century. We asked a researcher who got interesting in amur tiger and leopard. She said that there is no any record about distribution data in South Korea. [Comments] One minor quibble The single model of passerine species richness showed the increasing pattern of species richness with increasing latitude in South Korea. Mean temperature induced by latitude gradient negatively affected LAI and forest area, and positively habitat diversity. However, passerine species richness was only influenced by mean temperature and forest area. Expressions such as “negatively affected” are hard to understand. So, too, are using acronyms, such as LAI. A better way to write this paragraph would be. The single model of passerine species richness showed species richness increased with latitude in South Korea. Mean temperature increased with decreasing latitude, as did habitat diversity but leaf area index and forest area decline. However, mean temperature and forest area only influenced passerine species richness. Comparable examples occur throughout. [Response] Thank you so much for your considerate review. We remedied paragraph in abstract and conclusion section (line no. 28~44, 291~309), as you mentioned above. And we refrained using acronyms such as LAI in abstract and conclusion section. And for a detailed understanding of Fig.4 and 5, supplementary 2 and 3 files have been added. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245958.r002
12 Jan 2021 Decision Letter - Bi-Song Yue, Editor Testing the causal mechanism of the peninsular effect in passerine birds from South Korea PONE-D-20-29245R1 Dear Dr. Hong, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Bi-Song Yue, Ph.D Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245958.r003
Formally Accepted
20 Jan 2021 Acceptance Letter - Bi-Song Yue, Editor PONE-D-20-29245R1 Testing the causal mechanism of the peninsular effect in passerine birds from South Korea Dear Dr. Hong: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Bi-Song Yue Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245958.r004

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