The forests of the midwestern United States at Euro-American settlement: Spatial and physical structure based on contemporaneous survey data

Christopher J. Paciorek; Charles V. Cogbill; Jody A. Peters; John W. Williams; David J. Mladenoff; Andria Dawson; Jason S. McLachlan

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0246473

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionOctober 5, 2020
10 Dec 2020 Decision Letter - RunGuo Zang, Editor PONE-D-20-31336 The forests of the midwestern United States at Euro-American settlement: spatial and physical structure based on contemporaneous survey data PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Paciorek, 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 further clarify the methods section of the paper and make other minor revisions concerned by the referees Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 15 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. 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Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. [Note: HTML markup is below. 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: I Don't Know Reviewer #2: I Don't Know ****** 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: Yes 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 authors applied a statistical modeling approach to smooth the settlement-era Public Land Survey (PLS) data and presented gridded 8 km-resolution data products of the estimated stem density, basal area, and biomass of tree taxa at Euro-American settlement of the midwestern United States during the middle to late 19th century. This work is interesting, and the datasets generated may useful for studying several other related questions as listed in the manuscript. The authors have published several papers on the related topic and the manuscript is generally well written. In my opinion, the “Methods” part is too long and has many detailed information and description, it may be better to present the Methods in a concise way and move the detailed description into a supplementary material. In addition, there are a few points the authors need to clarify in their manuscript. 1. Line 51, give a concise description of the “Historical datasets”, what kinds of data are included in the “Historical datasets”. 2. Line 57, from line 53 to 57, the authors listed several aspects in which the datasets are potentially useful and could be applied to study those questions. I suggest the authors illustrate the applications of their dataset to those questions using proper examples. 3. Line 87, briefly describe the results obtained by [7], and explain the relationship between this work and [7], and highlight the novelty and significance of the current work. 4. Line 101, from line 92 to 101, the authors summarized the main idea of their manuscript. I suggest the authors clearly present the significance of their work at the end of the “Introduction”. Reviewer #2: I found this paper fascinating. The authors' story telling ability is appreciated. The paper mede me realize the potential of spatial and statistical methods in teasing out information from the historic databases. While the paper involves complex statistical analysis and makes some big conclusions, but the authors have acknowledged and discussed well the limitations of the methods and the caveats of the results and conclusions. Not perfect, but given the nature of the data and the question of interest, the methods seem reasonable. Some of the statistical techniques used are beyond my knowledge of the subject, but I have no reason to believe that there could be a problem with them. The study provides a lot of information and data. Overall, a very good paper and very well written. I really don have any major issues with the paper. Somehow the formatting of Table 2 did not allow its complete printing, but I did not find any problem with the contents. I would like to see larger fonts in the legends of Fig. 2. Also, I am not sure if you really need lines 92 to 101.It is unusual to provide these mini introductions to the other sections of the manuscripts, but it could be the writing style of the authors and I will leave it to them. Best wishes. ****** 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. 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Revision 1
18 Jan 2021 Author Response Dear Dr. Zang, We are submitting a revised version of PONE-D-20-31336. We thank you and the reviewers for thoughtful comments and suggestions. We’ve responded to the comments point by point below. Note that in our responses, the line numbers refer to the tracked changes version of the resubmitted manuscript. Editor comments 1. PLOS style requirements: Response: We’ve revised our file names to try to follow the requirements. In general, we believe we have satisfied the style requirements. Please let us know of anything we have overlooked. 2. We note that Figures 1-5 in your submission contain map images which may be copyrighted. Response: We’re not sure why you think the figures may be copyrighted. We created these figures using the data presented in this work. The copyright is held by us (the authors), so we shouldn’t need to seek permission from anyone. 3. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Response: All of the tables in our Supporting Information files have captions (we have two tables in S3 Appendix, an S4 Table, and no supporting figures). So we’re not sure what this request is referring to. We’re happy to make modifications if given additional guidance. Reviewer #1 comments • In my opinion, the “Methods” part is too long and has many detailed information and de- scription, it may be better to present the Methods in a concise way and move the detailed description into a supplementary material. In addition, there are a few points the authors need to clarify in their manuscript. Response: We’ve moved a number of additional details about the data cleaning/preprocessing (lines 159-187 and 210-237 in the original submission) to the supplementary material (lines 9-41, 237-265 in S1 Appendix). If required, we could move more details of the statistical smoothing as well. However, the smoothing approach we have taken is a new statistical ap- proach to such forest structure data and thus represents a core part of what is new about this work compared to [7], so we feel it appropriate to leave this in the main methods section. • 1. Line 51, give a concise description of the “Historical datasets”, what kinds of data are included in the “Historical datasets”. Response: We’ve changed “datasets” to be “vegetation surveys” in line 51 of the resubmis- sion to be more precise. Combined with the extensive discussion of the survey data in lines 65-76 of the resubmission, we feel that the description of the data used is clear. • 2. Line 57, from line 53 to 57, the authors listed several aspects in which the datasets are potentially useful and could be applied to study those questions. I suggest the authors illus- trate the applications of their dataset to those questions using proper examples. Response: We’ve added a number of citations in lines 54-57 of the resubmission that illus- trate such uses of these datasets. • 3. Line 87, briefly describe the results obtained by [7], and explain the relationship between this work and [7], and highlight the novelty and significance of the current work. Response: We’ve added more detail on what was done in [7] in lines 87-91 of the resubmis- sion. We’ve retained previous text (lines 91-95 in the resubmission) that also discussed how these results differ from [7]. Finally, we added text (lines 95-96 of the resubmission) to indicate that in this work we focus on analyzing the biogeographic patterns at the time of settlement (i.e., with less focus on comparing to the modern vegetation than in [7]). • 4. Line 101, from line 92 to 101, the authors summarized the main idea of their manuscript. I suggest the authors clearly present the significance of their work at the end of the “Intro- duction”. Response: We’ve added text in lines 109-115 of the resubmission to this effect. Reviewer #2 comments • Somehow the formatting of Table 2 did not allow its complete printing, but I did not find any problem with the contents. Response: Yes, we are a bit confused about how to present these wide tables. We tried to follow the PLOS requirements but welcome further guidance. • I would like to see larger fonts in the legends of Fig. 2. Response: We have increased the font size. • Also, I am not sure if you really need lines 92 to 101. It is unusual to provide these mini introductions to the other sections of the manuscripts, but it could be the writing style of the authors and I will leave it to them. Response: the first author is a statistician, and it is common in statistics papers to present an overview of the remainder of the paper at the end of the introduction. We’d like to leave this material, but if the Editor requests that we remove it, we will do so. Other changes In revising the manuscript, we have also made some other minor wording changes in various places in the document. These can of course be seen in the tracked changes version of the main manuscript and the S1 Appendix and S2 Appendix. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response_to_Reviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246473.r002
20 Jan 2021 Decision Letter - RunGuo Zang, Editor The forests of the midwestern United States at Euro-American settlement: spatial and physical structure based on contemporaneous survey data PONE-D-20-31336R1 Dear Dr. Paciorek, 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, RunGuo Zang Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): accept Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246473.r003
Formally Accepted
28 Jan 2021 Acceptance Letter - RunGuo Zang, Editor PONE-D-20-31336R1 The forests of the midwestern United States at Euro-American settlement: spatial and physical structure based on contemporaneous survey data Dear Dr. Paciorek: 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 Professor RunGuo Zang Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246473.r004

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