PONE-D-20-06092

“Ground Truthing” Environmental Barriers to Human Well-Being: Translational Research using a Multi-Site, Multi-City Approach for Iowa’s Diversifying Small Towns

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Shirtcliff,

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.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Tzai-Hung Wen, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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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: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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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: No

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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: No

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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: This study involves an interesting analysis of the built environment and correlates with well-being, specifically in rural areas with changing demographics. Analysis of the data appears sound overall, and the paper is generally well written. I have only a few comments and suggestions to improve the clarity of the presentation.

The term “ground-truthing” may be a bit misleading. The study uses both data derived from existing geospatial data sets and on-the-ground observations, but there is no verification of the geospatial data using the observations, as ground-truthing would imply.

I am somewhat familiar with POE for buildings, not for outdoor spaces. If this is an adaptation, or novel aspect of this work, please explain.

By line 295 (and Table 3), it became apparent that the comparison is mainly between small towns and state averages, and not between rural areas and diversifying rural areas. Some of the introduction and background (and the title of the paper) led me to expect an analysis of the effects of diversification, but I suppose that would require a longitudinal (long-term) study, or a broader study of small towns including some that have diversified and others that have not.

Specific Comments:

Line 50: Spell out SES the first time used.

Line 64: Briefly define “parallel lives.”

Line 130: It’s not clear if the study is considering actual physical barriers (highways, railways, waterways) that can promote segregation of populations.

Lines 370-374: A figure (bar chart) or table might be helpful for presenting these results.

Lines 398-400: It may be helpful to define some of these variables, unless they are well known in the field of landscape architecture.

Reviewer #2: This manuscript intended to study the equity of environmental exposure and its built environment factors of the exposure in three small towns in Iowa. Specifically, the authors aimed to compare the exposure between small towns and general urban populations. To evaluate environmental exposure, the secondary EPA data were collected and compared with a state average. Then a post-occupancy evaluation was conducted to explore built environment characteristics. This is an interesting topic and it’s good to see this counterbalance aside from a myriad of urban studies on this topic. However, this manuscript is not ready to be published due to the fact that the analysis and rigorous in writing are not of sufficient quality. So I recommend major revision for this manuscript. My main concerns are listed below.

1. The comparison between small towns and the state average is biased (Table 3), because the transect points are selective and supposed to have higher exposure to pollutants compared to the average in town – “each transect line had to cross environmental criteria potentially exacerbating risk, such as agricultural fields next to a public middle school” (line 229)

2. The aim of this research currently stands is blurry given to the chosen terminology “environmental barrier”. In the literature in environmental health this term is often referred to the barrier for disabled people, or barriers to outdoor activities. However, this study is focusing on “exposure to environmental pollutants”. Plus the point about environmental exposure is also not clear in the introduction. It is highly recommended to make the research goal clearer and coherent throughout the title, abstract, as well as the introduction.

(1) in the abstract, the aim of study is described in a very general way: “We aimed to understand the impact of built environments—all the physical parts of where people live and work—to contribute to healthy behaviors for vulnerable populations.” Please be specific on which part of the built-environment. I am also wondering that did the authors include any variables of “healthy behaviors” in this work? Why is environmental exposure missing in this objective?

(2) In section 1.3 research question, the single hypothesis is that the environmental exposure in the small towns is not different from the exposure that general urban populations hold. Here, the role of built environment is missing in the hypothesis, which is conflicting to point (1).

(3) following the previous point, if the equality of environmental exposure is the only research question, table 3 will be the only relevant result. Why POE analysis, PCA and MLM analysis are needed?

3. It is not justified the design of multilevel model. If the class here is the towns, there would be only three groups. The suggested group size for multilevel model is 50 (Moineddin 2007). Otherwise, for a sample size of 39, a simple map could be clear enough to see the variation between transect locations if that is the only purpose to use multilevel model.

Here are some minor comments.

1. Replace the comma by a full stop in the end of the abstract.

2. Line 59 it’s unclear that if Ozkan is a kind of evaluation or an author name of the cited work until checking the reference.

3. Line 115 what does the combination “[emphasis added] (2008)” mean?

4. Please revisit some sentences and paragraphs. For instance,

(1) can you put the concrete meaning of environmental barriers in line 129 to the first glance around line 52?

(2) Lines 144-146 the authors argue that traditional built-environment metrics such as density are not applicable to rural environments. Right after, can you state what BE components you use for this study instead?

(3) Line 202 “The built environment in small towns may serve parallel populations in a dichotomous manner with underrepresented minorities encountering a disproportionate access to environmental harms and benefits” and following with the hypothesis “The hypothesis, …, is that vulnerable residents at the intersection of low-SES and minority status are just as likely as wealthier, educated, English-speaking residents to live in environments lacking supportive socio- and natural ecosystem services and that no difference would be found…”. What is the connection between these two sentences? Why the provided context in the first sentence drives such an opposite hypothesis? Would you consider rephrase?

(4) Line 212 methods, it is not clear that what the (n=39) sample size means without reading the text afterward. Does it mean towns? Residents? Transects?

(5) Line 267 how those secondary station data fits into transect points? What's the interpolation approach? How many points of observations were calculated around the study sites?

5. At the paragraph lines 136-151, the authors did not mention components of the social environment, making the social criteria in Table 1 come at a surprise.

6. Please check if the POE variables in Table 6 and Table 2 are consistent. Can you put the definition of each variable in method (e.g. unique and history sound very fuzzy)?

7. The authors need to describe the population characteristics of those who conducted POE and discuss the limitation when generalize their perceptions.

8. The data sources of lead pain index and RMP facilities are missing.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PONE-D-20-06092R1

Ground Truthing” Environmental Risk with Design: Translational Research using a Multi-Site, Multi-City Approach for Iowa’s Diversifying Small Towns

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Shirtcliff,

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 30 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Tzai-Hung Wen, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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2. 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 #3: Partly

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

4. 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 #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

5. 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 #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

6. 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 #3: This manuscript presented a quantitative analysis for the understanding of equity of environment conditions and well being in small towns or rural areas in Iowa, USA. The topic is important and interesting. But, the manuscript is not ready for publication. The current status of the manuscript was poorly written, with too much of missing information, e.g. the data collection was not clear, how the data was analyzed from one step to another was not clearly described, and the most critical issue---the result figures were missing. These issues would generate too much of confusion for the readers. Especially because of the missing of result figures made me can't judge the quality of the manuscript. Therefore, I can't recommend acceptance for this manuscript. My main concerns were on the rigorousness of the study.

1. First, no figures were attached with the recent manuscript. I can only find three figures in previous submission, which might not be the latest version.

2. Second, I only see three Insert Figure positions (two Figure 2 insert) with figure captions. But the author mentioned Fig 4 (at least once in line 422), and Fig 5 multiple times (e.g. line 448, 468). This is unacceptable.

3. The tables were also needed to be confirmed before submitting the manuscript. The footnote of table 2 indicated Table 1. In Table 3, the value format was different in the "Range, Average (Standard Deviation)" column, e.g. first three rows were different. And, what is "m"; is it necessary to write "m"?

4. The term "ground-truthing" is misleading. The process of ground-truthing is merely one step of their data collection process. As mentioned by the authors: "ground truthing involves driving to locations to visibly verify existing conditions of the built environment [36]". This is a common practice is many social and geographical studies. Based on the aims (as written in section 1.3) and results, the authors did not make any contribution to "ground-truthing".

5. Using previous submission figures. The figure quality (for Fig 1 and 2) is unacceptable to be published. Especially Fig 1, no word in the maps can be recognized except the three location names. Therefore, all things written in lines 254-261 can't be observed from the maps. In addition, the organization of the maps are also not suitable for publications.

6. In section 2.3, the authors described a survey way of data collection, which produced the primary data in this study. The authors should also explicitly mention how many "graduate research assistants" were participated in the data collection process. Moreover, because this is the main data in the study, the authors should also provide a full list of questions in appendix or in the article to tell the readers what data were collected. The only question mentioned by the author was the example of vandalism.

7. Figure 2 in the previous submission is problematic. It presented as a line plots with two lines flow across the horizontal axis, with horizontal axis showing different factors and vertical axis showing the risk of exposures. Line plots can only be used to show trends that have a numerical and continuous horizontal and vertical axes. In this figure, the horizontal axis presented factors, which orders do not have any specific meanings.

Reviewer #4: This study aims to analyse the correlation between environmental risk and built environmental design and conducts precise analyses to demonstrate how the environment risks correlated with the built environment and vulnerability. The paper is well-organised, but the main worries are about the representation of environment design.

First, since the authors clarify that the aim is to see if there was a double threat of environmental risk and poor built environmental design, but the current presentation about environment design is still weak. The authors talked more about environment design and society (health, justices), how to measure environment design, how to evaluate environmental risks in the literature review, but the relationship between design and environmental risks is less mentioned. For example, in existing findings, what kinds of characteristics of the built environment can exacerbate the environmental risks, and can POE evaluate these characteristics effectively, is it validate to apply POE to study risk-related environment design? Or else, how to explain the usage of variables in table 6?

Second, although the analyses from 3.2, 3.3 and 3.4 are helpful, the necessary explanations of variables in MLM are in a lack, and the results are less convincing, which need more evidence. For example, ¨suggesting that places without easy access by car, bus, walking, or biking have reduced environmental risk¨, which is biased. If people cannot walk and cycle to these places, what is a need to study these places? The demonstrations about the analysis and results of MLM need improvement.

Additionally, more discussions about the results of MLM are in need. For example, why and how the variables are related to environmental risk from the findings of this paper. In all, the presentation about the correlation between environmental risk and design should be investigated more.

Minor comments:

1) In the section of 2.5, the structure of analysis should be clarified more, such as the connections of PCA and MLM analyses.

2) Please pay attention to the length of the introduction and literature. The first two paragraphs in literature are repeatable with the introduction, it is better to make them concise.

3) Line 169-170, is this paper the first one to apply the instrument Cross and Küller? If not, it is in a need to mention how others use it in urban and environmental studies.

4) Line 339-340, to be clear about the vulnerability, is it about healthy vulnerability or social vulnerability?

5) Line 389, the subtitle ¨Physical and social condition¨, which is not clear, is physical health or physical environment, society or socioeconomic factors?

6) Complement more information about the data (e.g.: year of data, quality).

[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.

Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: Reviewer 3.docx

PONE-D-20-06092R2

Crosscutting Environmental Risk with Design: A Multi-Site, Multi-City Socioecological Approach for Iowa’s Diversifying Small Towns

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Shirtcliff,

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 May 06 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.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Tzai-Hung Wen, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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2. 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 #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #3: I Don't Know

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

4. 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 #3: No

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

5. 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 #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

**********

6. 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 #3: This manuscript presented a series of analyses including post occupancy evaluation (POE), principal component analysis (PCA), and multi-level model (MLM) to study the parallel communities in several small towns in Iowa, for the understanding of how built environment affect the quality of living and health risks to different people. This is the second time I review this manuscript, and all my previous concerns were addressed in current version. My new concerns are about the MLM analysis and interpretation which I couldn't review for, due to the incompleteness of previous version. There are also some minor issues that require further refine before publication.

1. Figure 2, the Y-axis and legend are missing. I can imagine blue bars are component 1 and orange bars are component 2, but please be explicit as this is a formal publication. In addition, the information in Figure 2 and Table 4 is exactly same, hence redundant.

2. Same as above for Figure 3. And Figure 3/Table 5.

3. For Figure 4, the estimated ‘beta’(s) are known as coefficient(s) or slopes, but the term coefficient is more preferred; and the main issue is that the term ‘beta’ is less formal and not preferred.

4. Second issue about Figure 4 is that in the figure, the Y-axis is written as ‘Increase in Environmental Risk’—how does this MLM slopes can be used to interpret as the ‘increase in environmental risk’? Please explain.

5. The process of running the MLM is not clear. E.g., what is(are) the dependent variable(s) in the ‘multiple multilinear models’ (page 18 line 391)? How does the ‘multiple multilinear model’ works? This line (391) is under section of ‘3.5 POE and MLM’, but no ‘multilinear model’ is described in analysis method section (sec 2.5). Based on the sec 2.5 lines 293-306, as a reader I would expect only one multivariate multilevel model will be presented.

6. Is it valid to compare different models? Related to previous point, it seems unclear, and based on what were written by the authors, there are more than one models in the study and presented in table 6/figure 4.

7. Table 6, I would suggest the authors to use ‘*’ to show the statistical significance instead of italicized. Mystery and complexity are not italicized in table 6, are them not significant? Access were italicized, but according to the table footnote, all but access are significant (p<.05). The description in footnote and written in table is conflict.

8. Please make sure all relevant data is provided. It seems like the data described in sec 2.3---those data collected with the Fulcrum tool--- is not provided by the authors. According to Plos One policy, all data underlying the findings should be provided without restriction. The data in Table 2 is only showing the mean, SD etc., and the data points behind this info should be provided. The raw data in sec 2.4 seems download-able from publicly available source so it should be fine, but it would be better if a cleaned and extracted copy for only the study sites can also be provided.

Reviewer #4: This paper addressed the comments well in the previous version and improved the quality of the paper. Overall, the paper is well-organized, but I still have a few minor comments that need authors to spend more time on that: 1) the introduction is still too long. For section1.1 and 1.2, there is a single paragraph at the beginning, but it is not necessary. These parts are also wordy. Also, the logistic between sections is confusing: why section 1.1 is the literature review? It will be apparent if the authors can make the introduction concise and straightforward. 2) The figures are expected in high-quality, especially for the results, but figure 2 and figure 3 are not qualified, missing the axis, title and legend. The texts in Figure 4 are too close and not clear to read. 3) The limitations of this paper are not mentioned enough, which also embodied in the data collection and qualitative method.

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Reviewer #3: No

Reviewer #4: No

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Crosscutting Environmental Risk with Design: A Multi-Site, Multi-City Socioecological Approach for Iowa’s Diversifying Small Towns

PONE-D-20-06092R3

Dear Dr. Shirtcliff,

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.

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Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #4: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

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Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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Reviewer #3: Yes

Reviewer #4: Yes

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Reviewer #3: (No Response)

Reviewer #4: I have no specific comments with regard to the current version. The paper has been improved and meet the requirement after addressing.

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