Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations governing prey choice by hunters in a post-war African forest-savannah macromosaic

Franciany Braga-Pereira; Carlos A. Peres; Rômulo Romeu da Nóbrega Alves; Carmén Van-Dúnem Santos

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0261198

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionMarch 20, 2021
11 Jun 2021 Decision Letter - Emmanuel Serrano, Editor PONE-D-21-09230 Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations governing prey choice by hunters in a post-war African forest-savannah macromosaic PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Braga-Pereira, 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. 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. As you will see, our referee underlined the interest of considering the interviewed occupation in the motivations for prey acquisition objective. Other interesting methodological details have also been underlined in the review report, please consider all of them in a further version of you work. On the other hand, test of null hypotheses and AIC model selection should not be used together. In fact, your AIC model selection will allow you to select the most parsimonious model including significant and non-significant variables (see page 83 of Burnham and Anderson.2002 Model selection and multimodel inference book). Them, the effect size of specific variables should be assessed by their relative importance or the R2. P-values are not a measure of their importance. (see Halsey Lewis G. 2019. The reign of the p-value is over: what alternative analyses could we employ to fill the power vacuum? Biol. Lett.152019017420190174). In any case, if you decide to use p-values, please provide the full statistics (F-value, df, p-value) instead of naked p-values. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 26 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. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Emmanuel Serrano, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements. 1. Please ensure that your manuscript meets PLOS ONE's style requirements, including those for file naming. 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 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=ba62/PLOSOne_formatting_sample_title_authors_affiliations.pdf 2. Please include additional information regarding the survey or questionnaire used in the study and ensure that you have provided sufficient details that others could replicate the analyses. For instance, if you developed a questionnaire as part of this study and it is not under a copyright more restrictive than CC-BY, please include a copy, in both the original language and English, as Supporting Information. 3. We note that the grant information you provided in the ‘Funding Information’ and ‘Financial Disclosure’ sections do not match. When you resubmit, please ensure that you provide the correct grant numbers for the awards you received for your study in the ‘Funding Information’ section. 4. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere. [Only the map in this manuscript is also in other two articles, submeted as a related manuscript file] Please clarify whether this publication was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript. 5. We note that you have indicated that data from this study are available upon request. PLOS only allows data to be available upon request if there are legal or ethical restrictions on sharing data publicly. For more information on unacceptable data access restrictions, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. 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. 6. We note that Figure 1 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. We require you to either (1) present written permission from the copyright holder to publish these figures specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license, or (2) remove the figures from your submission: 6.1. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figure 1 to publish the content specifically under the CC BY 4.0 license. We recommend that you contact the original copyright holder with the Content Permission Form (http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/file?id=7c09/content-permission-form.pdf) and the following text: “I request permission for the open-access journal PLOS ONE to publish XXX under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CCAL) CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Please be aware that this license allows unrestricted use and distribution, even commercially, by third parties. Please reply and provide explicit written permission to publish XXX under a CC BY license and complete the attached form.” Please upload the completed Content Permission Form or other proof of granted permissions as an "Other" file with your submission. In the figure caption of the copyrighted figure, please include the following text: “Reprinted from [ref] under a CC BY license, with permission from [name of publisher], original copyright [original copyright year].” 6.2. If you are unable to obtain permission from the original copyright holder to publish these figures under the CC BY 4.0 license or if the copyright holder’s requirements are incompatible with the CC BY 4.0 license, please either i) remove the figure or ii) supply a replacement figure that complies with the CC BY 4.0 license. Please check copyright information on all replacement figures and update the figure caption with source information. If applicable, please specify in the figure caption text when a figure is similar but not identical to the original image and is therefore for illustrative purposes only. The following resources for replacing copyrighted map figures may be helpful: USGS National Map Viewer (public domain): http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/ The Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth (public domain): http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/sseop/clickmap/ Maps at the CIA (public domain): https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html and https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/cia-maps-publications/index.html NASA Earth Observatory (public domain): http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/ Landsat: http://landsat.visibleearth.nasa.gov/ USGS EROS (Earth Resources Observatory and Science (EROS) Center) (public domain): http://eros.usgs.gov/# Natural Earth (public domain): http://www.naturalearthdata.com/ [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 ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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: 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 ****** 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 main merits of this manuscript are (1) using local knowledge to provide an interesting, useful and easy methodology to (2) estimate the motivations of hunters in a post-war area. In many places worldwide, the only data available for management and conservation proposes is the ecological local knowledge (besides hunting bags when available), therefore any method focused on using this knowledge to produce population estimates (management) and the motivations for killing certain species (conservation) will be proven very helpful, especially when referring to natural areas or countries with strong budget limitations or low-income economies. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to change a person's behavior towards wildlife (e.g., feeding or poaching) without knowing the motivations behind that behavior. This study addresses a stated need of new strategies which, based on the motivations towards hunting certain species, help to better plan for the management of ecosystems that are recovering from strong disturbances, such as wars, and where poaching is present with strong impact on the recovery of wildlife populations. This is a sound-based manuscript; however, I have some remarks on the text General comments: L79-82: I may not have understood this part of the manuscript correctly, so in that case the authors should state it clearer, but when asking about the motivation behind the pursuit each wild mammals during the semi-structured individual interviews, did the authors used a closed questionary based on Muth and Bowe 1998, and the rest of the intrinsic, extrinsic and individual based motivations mentioned in the manuscript, or did you allowed the hunters to relate their motivations without any “constrain”? I ask this question since you the authors had the opportunity to collect first-hand the motivations of hunters in a post-war area, I think that the appearance of unpredicted motivations could have had a great importance, both for the results and for the impact of the present manuscript. Moreover, I think the discussion of the manuscript could be improved if the results of this study were compared with other studies, stating similarities and differences with the motivations of poachers in other post-war areas (if any, and ideally in other continents), or in non-post-war areas, such as the study cited Muth and Bowe 1998, in the USA, where the conditions for poachers were totally different. L211 Data analysis. I have several concerns about the data analysis: The authors interviewed 115 hunters with different ages (19-80 years old), from eight settlements (one located in the Game reserve), with different population densities and located in different ecosystems (forest-savannah). If I was a manager of this or a similar natural area wanting to implement conservation strategies based on working with the communities, I would find attractive your study but after reading the manuscript, several questions would come to my mind. Are the motivations for hunting the same along all ages and settlements regardless of their differences? Besides stating the differences in the activity among male and female and adults, children and the elderly, the manuscript would be improved if the authors evaluated possible differences in the motivations due to the hunters’ characteristics. As the authors did not evaluated differences due to hunters’ characteristics, why did the authors used a GLM instead of a GLMM, where the hunter and the settlement were included as nested random effects? The results would be more robust. But as I stated before, I think that the authors are not taking full advantage of what they could get from the data. In my opinion and based on my experience, to study the motivations of human behaviors towards wildlife based on surveys, the multivariate statistical tests can give you more information, especially those based on the canonical ordination, such as multiple factor analysis (http://www.sthda.com/english/articles/31-principal-component-methods-in-r-practical-guide/116-mfa-multiple-factor-analysis-in-r-essentials/). Minor comments: L44-46: I recommend to review the citations in text and references. Just as an example I found two mistakes between L82 and L86 (e.g. In L82 you cited (Muth and Bowe 1998) but I cannot find the citation in references, L86-87 you cited as (Knapp and Peace 2017) but the article has three authors. L199-201: Again, I may not have understood this part correctly, if so, the authors should state it clearer. In the example: “if the grazer/frugivore Tragelaphus oryx consumes 70% grass and 30% fruit, its mean trophic energy level would be 2.7 (= (0.7 × 3) + (0.3 × 2)”, but according to the levels in L195-197 ((1) grazer/folivore < (2) frugivore < (3) granivore…) the level should be 1.3 (= (0.7 × 1) + (0.3 × 2). L343-367: The authors should state the usefulness of ecological local knowledge as a tool to estimate wildlife abundance. ****** 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 [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.0261198.r001
Revision 1
19 Nov 2021 Author Response To: Emmanuel Serrano Academic Editor of Plos One Dear Editor, We are submitting a new version of our manuscript (ID: PONE-D-21-09230) entitled “Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations governing prey choice by hunters in a post-war African forest-savannah macromosaic”. We would like to thank the editor and reviewer for the comprehensive comments and suggestions on the paper. We appreciate the feedback and believe that responding to these comments have improved the quality of our manuscript. Please find below a point-by-point response to the comments provided by the Editor and Reviewer. We are providing two versions of the Manuscript, one with and other without track changes, so that you can see exactly what has been altered. Note that the lines indicated below is referring to the clean version of the Manuscript. Yours sincerely Franciany G. Braga-Pereira (on behalf of all co-authors)Journal: Plos One Ref:PONE-D-21-09230 We included in the analysis results of the linear models the F-value, df and Adjusted R-squared (lines 252-257; 370-373). For generalized linear models and generalized linear mixed models we used residual checks to verify whether our models were, in principle, suitable or otherwise. Finally, we used the Akaike information criterion to select models of interest if ∆AIC values >6 (∆AIC obtain from the difference between a null and complete model AIC values). ΔAIC>6 was chosen following Harrison et al., (2018) and Richards (2008) (lines 240-243; 265- 268). We included the questionnaire in both in the original language (Portuguese) and in English, as Supporting Information. The map we published in Elsevier (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320720308028) is under copyright, which means the map used in the previous version of this article was also under copyright. We contacted Elsevier to request a license to use the images, however we didn’t get a return, so we made a new map. Because of that, below, we have included two map options. Option 1 is similar the original map, but not the same. If it is possible to use this option 1, it would interest as it demarcates the savannah and forest landscapes. If, because of the similarity between this new map and the original one, you choose a more different image; we have created a second map option (Option 2) People involved in the research answered questions about hunting, which is an illegal activity in the region. For this reason, we need to maintain the anonymityof informants, because data contain potentially sensitive information imposed by UFPB ethics committee (email: comitedeetica@ccs.ufpb.br). Results presented herein are entirely original and this paper is not being considered for publication in other journal. All sources of funding are acknowledged in the manuscript, and all appropriate ethics and other approvals were obtained for this research. This research project was registered in the Plataforma Brasil, which is a Brazilian database of research records involving human communities and prior research approval was obtained from the Research Ethics Committee of the Health Sciences Center at the Federal University of Paraiba - (CEP -CCS- UFPB-CAAE 59846816.3.0000.5188). This study was also authorized by the Environmental Ministry of Angola (Ministério do Ambiente de Angola) based on license number 148INBAC. MINAMB/2016 and by all local community leaders of human settlements in which this research was conducted. We also received a municipal authorization from the mayor of Quiçama (city of Angola) via license number 017 / GAB.ADM.M.Q / 2017. We confirm the first author of the manuscript submitted to Plos One (Franciany Braga-Pereira) is the author of the map used in the manuscript. Reviewer #1: The main merits of this manuscript are (1) using local knowledge to provide an interesting, useful and easy methodology to (2) estimate the motivations of hunters in a post-war area. In many places worldwide, the only data available for management and conservation proposes is the ecological local knowledge (besides hunting bags when available), therefore any method focused on using this knowledge to produce population estimates (management) and the motivations for killing certain species (conservation) will be proven very helpful, especially when referring to natural areas or countries with strong budget limitations or low-income economies. As a matter of fact, it is impossible to change a person's behavior towards wildlife (e.g., feeding or poaching) without knowing the motivations behind that behaviour. This study addresses a stated need of new strategies which, based on the motivations towards hunting certain species, help to better plan for the management of ecosystems that are recovering from strong disturbances, such as wars, and where poaching is present with strong impact on the recovery of wildlife populations. This is a sound-based manuscript; however, I have some remarks on the text. Authors: We are very grateful for these positive comments and effort to improve our manuscript. We followed all of your suggestions and we believe that our manuscript has been further strengthened after these recommendations. Reviewer #1 L79-82: I may not have understood this part of the manuscript correctly, so in that case the authors should state it clearer, but when asking about the motivation behind the pursuit each wild mammals during the semi-structured individual interviews, did the authors used a closed questionary based on Muth and Bowe 1998, and the rest of the intrinsic, extrinsic and individual basedmotivations mentioned in the manuscript, or did you allowed the hunters to relate their motivations without any “constrain”? I ask this question since you the authors had the opportunity to collect first-hand the motivations of hunters in a post-war area, I think that the appearance of unpredicted motivations could have had a great importance, both for the results and for the impact of the present manuscript. Authors: We agree with your comments regarding the opportunity to first-hand collect the motivations of hunters and we confirmed we allowed the hunters to relate their motivations without any “constrain”. We had improve the main manuscript for a better explanation on that (lines 186-199) and we provided the whole questionnaire used in this study in the supplementary material. Reviewer #1 Moreover, I think the discussion of the manuscript could be improved if the results of this study were compared with other studies, stating similarities and differences with the motivations of poachers in other post-war areas (if any, and ideally in other continents), or in non-post-war areas, such as the study cited Muth and Bowe 1998, in the USA, where the conditions for poachers were totally different. Authors: We agree with you and had improved the discussion on that (lines 452- 460; 510-514; 521-545) Reviewer 1# L211 Data analysis. I have several concerns about the data analysis: The authors interviewed 115 hunters with different ages (19-80 years old), from eight settlements (one located in the Game reserve), with different population densities and located in different ecosystems (forest-savannah). If I was a manager of this or a similar natural area wanting to implement conservation strategies based on working with the communities, I would find attractive your study but after reading the manuscript, several questions would come to my mind. Are the motivations for hunting the same along all ages and settlements regardless of their differences? Besides stating the differences in theactivity among male and female and adults, children and the elderly, the manuscript would be improved if the authors evaluated possible differences in the motivations due to the hunters’ characteristics. As the authors did not evaluated differences due to hunters’ characteristics, why did the authors used a GLM instead of a GLMM, where the hunter and the settlement were included as nested random effects? The results would be more robust. But as I stated before, I think that the authors are not taking full advantage of what they could get from the data. In my opinion and based on my experience, to study the motivations of human behaviors towards wildlife based on surveys, the multivariate statistical tests can give you more information, especially those based on the canonical ordination, such as multiple factor analysis (http://www.sthda.com/english/articles/31-principal-component-methods-in-rpractical-guide/116-mfa-multiple-factor-analysis-in-r-essentials/). Authors: We appreciated this comment. We had performed a MFA for better understand the similarities of species selected to attend different hunting motivations regarding species body mass and energetic level; sampled site; and interviewee age and sex. In addition, to examine the effects of species body mass and trophic level; and interviewee age, gender and natal community on the number of hunters reporting each hunting motivation for killing any given species we performed generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) and generalized linear models (GLM). We performed a GLMM considering the interviewee as a random variable; and the body mass and energetic level as fixed predict variable. We assigned the 8 sampled communities into four study sites according to type of landscape structure (forest of savannah) and geographic position. We therefore sampled two communities in savannah areas of northern Quiçama; two in savannah areas of southern Quiçama; two in central forest areas; and two communities in southern forest areas. By this way we could better explain our results for readers not familiar to the area and in the same time to ensure the interviewee confidentiality, as some communities contained few hunters.See lines in the Methods section: 217-228; 232-249; 260-272. See lines in the Results section: 313-328; Table 1 (355); 396-409. See lines in the Discussion section: 489-509; 562-567. See Supplementary Material: Figures 2 and 3. Reviewer 1#L44-46: I recommend to review the citations in text and references. Just as an example I found two mistakes between L82 and L86 (e.g. In L82 you cited (Muth and Bowe 1998) but I cannot find the citation in references, L86-87 you cited as (Knapp and Peace 2017) but the article has three authors. Authors: Thank you for your comment. We have reviewed the citations and references. Reviewer1# L199-201: Again, I may not have understood this part correctly, if so, the authors should state it clearer. In the example: “if the grazer/frugivore Tragelaphus oryx consumes 70% grass and 30% fruit, its mean trophic energy level would be 2.7 (= (0.7 × 3) + (0.3 × 2)”, but according to the levels in L195- 197 ((1) grazer/folivore < (2) frugivore < (3) granivore…) the level should be 1.3 (= (0.7 × 1) + (0.3 × 2). Authors: Thank you for your comment. We corrected the text (line 203-208). Reviewer 1#L343-367: The authors should state the usefulness of ecological local knowledge as a tool to estimate wildlife abundance. Authors: Thank you for your comment. We agree and had edited the text (lines:621-624) Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response_letter.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261198.r002
22 Nov 2021 Decision Letter - Emmanuel Serrano, Editor PONE-D-21-09230R1Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations governing prey choice by hunters in a post-war African forest-savannah macromosaicPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Braga-Pereira, 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. ============================== I am so sorry for the delays in the review of this interesting work. We have just to deal with some minor comments (about including some paraph about the use of questionaries and others about how did you perform model selection based on AIC values) before the final acceptance of your work. I look forward to hearing from your revised work Sincerely yours Emmanuel ============================== Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 06 2022 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: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Emmanuel Serrano, PhD 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. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: [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: PONE-D-21-09230_R1_Revised.pdf Attachment Submitted filename: AIC model selection, example.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261198.r003
Revision 2
25 Nov 2021 Author Response We included a sentence on the use of interviews in the introduction section and also included some references (lines 113-119). We decided to follow the paper you suggested us and had included all possible models and compered their AIC values (247-250, 353-362). The model with the lowest AIC was retained, and the remaining competing models were ordered according to their Akaike differences (ΔAIC) with respect to the best model (lowest AIC) following Burnham & Anderson (2003). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response_letter.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261198.r004
26 Nov 2021 Decision Letter - Emmanuel Serrano, Editor Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations governing prey choice by hunters in a post-war African forest-savannah macromosaic PONE-D-21-09230R2 Dear Dr. Braga-Pereira, 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, Emmanuel Serrano, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261198.r005
Formally Accepted
7 Dec 2021 Acceptance Letter - Emmanuel Serrano, Editor PONE-D-21-09230R2 Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations governing prey choice by hunters in a post-war African forest-savannah macromosaic Dear Dr. Braga-Pereira: 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. Emmanuel Serrano Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0261198.r006

Open letter on the publication of peer review reports

PLOS recognizes the benefits of transparency in the peer review process. Therefore, we enable the publication of all of the content of peer review and author responses alongside final, published articles. Reviewers remain anonymous, unless they choose to reveal their names.

We encourage other journals to join us in this initiative. We hope that our action inspires the community, including researchers, research funders, and research institutions, to recognize the benefits of published peer review reports for all parts of the research system.

Learn more at ASAPbio .