Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionOctober 1, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-30912 Resource selection of a nomadic ungulate in a dynamic landscape PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Stratmann, 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. Both reviewers felt the manuscript was well-written, the study design sound, and the article addressed a little studied topic. Reviewer 1 mainly had editing suggestions which reviewer 2 did as well. Reviewer 2, however, had methodological concerns that need to be considered and addressed in your revision or offer clearly stated rebuttals. I have one comment about labeling the species as nomadic. After reading your manuscript, in particular the life history of Mongolian gazelles, I believe that Mongolian gazelles are nomadic. But I wondered why a metric such as net displacement was not calculated and reported to quantify nomadic behavior. I foresee a day when nomadic behavior is more thoroughly studied, and a common metric summarizing nomadic behavior across studies might lead to work that more fully examines the causes and consequences of this behavior. Please submit your revised manuscript by January 23, 2021. 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. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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The PLOS ONE style templates can be found at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=wjVg/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_main_body.pdf and 2. In your Methods section, please provide additional location information of the study area, including geographic coordinates for the data set if available. 3. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. 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: Stratmann et al examined habitat selection by Mongolian gazelles as it relates to selection of snow cover in winter and NDVI in summer at several spatial scales using RSFs and SSFs. Overall, I found the manuscript well written and clear. I do however have a few methodological concerns which I outline below, along with several minor comments. L219-226: I’m a bit confused here. Why were data reclassified to just snow/no-snow? Would it not be more accurate to maintain the snow cover extent data in the original layer instead of seemingly making each pixel binary? And if this was done, was there a cutoff? If a pixel had, say 10% snow cover extent, was this classified as “snow”? If so, this would make for a highly inflated mean snow cover extent at the 5 X 5 km scale, as each pixel could be 10% and the result would be an area with 100% snow cover. 5 X 5 km also seems like a very coarse scale to use here. If this is the average that a gazelle walks in a day, they can really only select for a very limited number of pixels that are in the immediate vicinity of the pixel they are in at the start of the day (and likely wouldn’t have any information about many neighboring pixels). L246-253: This seems strange to me. By drawing your point outside the daily movement range buffer of the location, you are essentially excluding all the habitat that that gazelle could plausibly select as an alternative resource, while only including spatial data that is likely outside where the individual can select. L255-256: I don’t believe a normal GLMM (or GLM) is sufficient here. Individual locations correspond with available locations drawn at the same timeframe. That is, points are matched temporally. This data is lost in a typical regression, where an animal can still “choose” different points in time. I think this model should be a conditional logistic regression using either ‘clogit’ as was done for SSFs, or using the method developed by Muff et al (2020), which would permit the addition of random terms. Minor comments: L34/35: selection “at” the population/individual level? L36: Why “spatio-“ here? This line only references differences in temporal scales. L67: Why “interact to”? Are plant characteristics interacting, or is it simply that plant characteristics influence herbivore selection? L77: “To work for” isn’t very clear. I suggest recasting this sentence, or simply cutting the first five words of the sentence. L90, 126, 206: “Mongolian gazelles” L113/114: References? L177: I suggest changing this sentence a bit. This wording could mean that there are no open plains or rolling hills. L187: Individuals cannot adapt, as this is a result of natural selection across generations. To make this sentence clearer, I suggest either using the term “acclimate”, or changing this to something along the lines of “gazelles must therefore be adapted to cope with a wide range of conditions”, depending on which meaning you wish to portray. L190-191: NDVI is a value, not snow cover. How was snow cover determined from the NDVI layers? I assume based on the snow “flag”/layer of MODIS NDVI, but I think this should be explained. To be clear, this was when no pixels in the entire study area had a snow cover flag? L209: Should this be “rarefied” instead of summarized? L236-237: Why did you crop MCPs? Was there a biological reason to exclude points outside Mongolia? What proportion of points did this represent? L277: “and snow”? L293: “allowed us to sample” L304-306: This is confusing. This describes the procedure for the winter models, yet the example is from a gazelle in spring? Obviously these are related, but should this be temporal scale instead of spatial (the spatial scale is changing because the temporal one is). L308: Typo in “therefore”. L348: “At” the population level? Table 1: The AIC Weight for growing season doesn’t make sense. For the top model to be 0.66 and the 2nd highest to be <0.001, then there has to be a lot of other models with small (but not insignificant) weights to make up the difference, Unless these are not the two top models? L391: I don’t follow this. Weren’t linear and quadratic the only shapes tested? So isn’t this statement guaranteed to be the case? L392-395: I think this needs to be reworked. I’m guessing the first sentence is suggesting a variety of responses across individuals, with some exhibiting positive and some exhibiting negative linear selection, and some with the downward parabola. This should be more explicitly explained. Stating that gazelles selected for max, min, and intermediate levels sounds like they simply select everything (see also lines 495-497). Is the 2nd sentence true for individuals who selected an intermediate amount of snow cover? L452: Remove first “for” in “to detect for selection for forage”. L454, 610: Change “preference” to selection. Preference typically is used to describe a situation where selection is quantified when availability is equal (e.g., a cafeteria trial). L457-459: This is a very short disjointed paragraph with really no discussion per se. L460: This seems early in the Discussion to be conjecturing about differences between your study and others. I suggest moving this to near the end of the discussion. L469: Citation? L574: What is meant by “important”? Important for what? For these to be classified as animal personalities? Fig. 2: The overall resolution of this figure is quite low. The two shades of blue are also quite difficult to tell apart, especially in bars with only a single color. Fig. 4: Define the horizontal dashed line in the caption and legend and make it a different line type from the vertical line for snow cover in 2014/15. Well done, this was an enjoyable paper to read. Reviewer #2: The manuscript “Resource selection of a nomadic ungulate in a dynamic landscape” addresses interesting topic of evaluating resource selection of nomadic Mongolian gazelle. The study provides an important contribution to this topic by addressing selection at multiple spatio-temporal scales using a solid sample size of observational data and appropriate modelling techniques. The strengths of the paper are the strong conceptual framework used to understand nomadic spatial behaviour in ungulates, which is currently understudied. And the complex evaluation of such behaviour across multiple spatial and temporal scales will result in this paper being important. The weakness, which I’m sure you are aware, is the use of proxies, such as NDVI for forage, and snow cover for snow depth. However, this is overshadowed to me by the importance and the rarity of studies on habitat selection of nomadic ungulates in particular, and the methods you used which are appropriate and rigorous. Finally, I think a short statement in the discussion regarding possible changes in behavior of nomadic Mongolian gazelle with climate change could help to improve the visibility of the paper. The study is generally well-perceived, concisely written and well organized. Thus, my concerns are relatively minor and mostly address unclear passages in the text. Altogether I recommend only minor revisions of the manuscript. Bellow, I list my concerns in more detail (I also included my comments as the “sticky notes” directly into the pdf of the manuscript and highlighted the related text with a yellow background): L 56 – “That which is known” - consider re-phrasing L 56 – “seasons” instead of “season”? L 64 – … we used Mongolian gazelles… - use either "as a model species" or "for this case study"... L 77 – 79 – this is a bit confusing... FMH works for both, residents and migrants... both can select for intermediate forage biomass during whole growing season... try re-phrasing L 98 – unclear... it seems like you mean "trade-offs in selection between habitat types" L 107 – 108 – I suggest improving, resp. re-phrasing this sentence L 114 – 115 – ..."to conclude"... instead of …”to arrive at an overall conclusion”… L 126 – 130 – I think this description is more suitable for Methods/Study area description L 140 - …”in a fission-fussion manner”… - Im not sure what this term supposed to mean within this context. L 162 – 163 – sounds like Methods L 186 – 196 – I dont think this should go to Study area. This is the setting of the temporal scale of your study, it should be under description of the RSFs. L 207 – 208 – How long were animals tracked? min - max months, average +-SD... How many points were collected from 1 animal? min - max, average +-SD L 222 – This sentence would need a citation. L 233 – ..."we generated"... instead of …”we had to generate”… L 245 – I suggest re-phrasing the beginning of the sentence... L 292 – missing space - ..."and 10 days..." L 293 – ..."allowed us"... instead of …”lets us”… L 322 – 326 – Id say this is already Results... L 398 – By switching selection strategies, do you mean switching between linear and quadratic selection? And also, do you mean selection for NDVI or snow? L 454 – ... selection for higher NDVI... instead of ... preference for higher NDVI... ********** 6. 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| Revision 1 |
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Resource selection of a nomadic ungulate in a dynamic landscape PONE-D-20-30912R1 Dear Dr. Stratmann, 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, Floyd W Weckerly Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): There was one revised sentence I think should be as originally written (ln 554-555). As written: This raises the question of what search strategies can be used when a landscape that has large, homogeneous patches. Originally written: This raises the question of what search strategies can be used when a landscape has large, homogeneous patches. Reviewers' comments: |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-20-30912R1 Resource selection of a nomadic ungulate in a dynamic landscape Dear Dr. Stratmann: 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. Floyd W Weckerly Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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