PONE-D-21-26888

Slowing deforestation in Indonesia follows declining oil palm expansion and lower oil prices

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Gaveau,

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.

==============================

ACADEMIC EDITOR:

Please make more clarifications on the methods used in the paper.

Please ensure that your decision is justified on PLOS ONE’s publication criteria and not, for example, on novelty or perceived impact.

For Lab, Study and Registered Report Protocols: These article types are not expected to include results but may include pilot data. 

==============================

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 27 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,

RunGuo Zang

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal requirements:

1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.

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. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript:

“This work was funded by the WWF-US and Global Environment Facility (GEF) under the Good Growth Partnership, and in collaboration with the Trase Initiative. DS’s time was covered by NMBU.”

We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form.

Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows:

 “This work was funded by the WWF-US and Global Environment Facility (GEF) under the Good Growth Partnership, and in collaboration with the Trase Initiative. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript”

Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

3. We note that Figure(s) 2 & 3 in your submission contain [map/satellite] 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:

a. You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figure(s) 2 & 3 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].”

 b. 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/

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.

Additional Editor Comments:

The comments from the referees are postive to your manuscript.What you need in the revision is to make more clarifications on your methods.

[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: Partly

Reviewer #3: Yes

********** 

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: N/A

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #3: 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: General comments:

I initially declined to review this paper, citing my lack of expertise in land use change detection and quantification, as well as having no background in economics. I did however state I was willing to review as a general non-subject-expert tropical forest ecologist, and I accepted the second review invitation under that condition. I advise the Subject Editor to make sure the other reviews are from subject-matter experts, and to consider my review as addressing more basic aspects common to any scientific paper.

As a general scientific reader (see caveats above) I found the paper interesting and readable. It addresses an important topic and is in general well-written and clearly presented.

Data are stated to be available “for interactive viewing” at a website. However it would be impossible for a reader to know exactly what data from that website were used, and there is no guarantee that those data will be available over the long term. I suggest that authors provide the exact data that were used in their analyses, either in a separate data deposition on Dryad or the like, or as Supplemental Information. Websites and their databases change and disappear, whereas depositing the exact data used to produce this paper on Dryad or as SI “freezes” the exact data used in this paper. Just providing a web link for interactive viewing definitely does not comply PLOS One’s data availability policy of providing the “data required to replicate all study findings reported in the article, as well as related metadata and methods”

This manuscript was difficult to review because it did not follow PLOS One formatting guidelines, which require line numbers: “Include page numbers and line numbers in the manuscript file.” Lacking line numbers to refer to, I used several words of the text in brackets instead; the authors will have to use text search to find the section I’m referring to. References in the text also do not follow PLOS One format (brackets instead of superscripts).

Specific comments:

The title seems logically reversed. The assertion is that lower palm oil prices drive slower deforestation and oil palm plantation expansion, so the more logical would seem to be

“Lower palm oil prices are associated with decreased deforestation and oil palm expansion in Indonesia”

The distinction between industrial and smallholder farms should be quantified when it is Introduced in the Introduction. What is the upper bound in ha for small holder, and the lower bound in ha for an industrial plantation?

Putting Materials and Methods after Results is permitted by PLOS One manuscript guidelines. My question to the Authors though is, does that make sense? How could one intelligently read a Results section without first reading the Methods? If one has to read the Methods to understand the Results, why not put the Methods first so the reader can read the paper in logical order?

[Smallholder plantations are smaller] – Give some indication of the size range, for example a mean + SEM in ha.

Table 1. Define “industrial” in “rapid conversion to industrial”

Reviewer #2: Oil palm expansion in the Southeast Asia plays an important role in forest conversion in the region. Spatiotemporal analyses of changes in oil palm distribution and deforestation help quantify this role and contribute to scientifically sound management of the land. There are existing studies and mappings of oil palm expansion in Indonesia, and this manuscript tries to improve such studies by providing time-series mapping of oil palm distribution and separating industrial and smallholder oil palm plantations. The results highlighted declining oil palm expansion and slowing deforestation, which are in general aligned with the existing studies.

1) Time-series mapping of smallholder oil palm plantations is an important contribution of the manuscript; however, the approach is questionable. The authors used an existing map of smallholder oil palm plantations in 2016-2018 and the time series of tree loss maps to derive the annual distributions back to the period of 2001–2019. This method implicitly assumes that all the distributions in the years of 2001 – 2019 are bounded by the existing map in 2016 – 2018. This assumption needs to be justified.

2) The delineation and classification of two types of oil palm plantations are mostly relying on the visual interpretation of satellite images. In such case, survey to local experts is suggested to verify the mapping results.

3) Current ground truthing is mostly based on the checking of 3440 pixels in 2019. Since the manuscript focuses on the time series mapping in 2001 – 2019, the ground truthing pixels/year should be spread to the different time periods such as the beginning, the middle, and the late periods of 2001 – 2019.

4) The Kappa statistic is a more reliable index on classification accuracy, which is missing in the results.

Reviewer #3: This is a superbly executed and clearly written and presented study on a very important topic. The manuscript provides long-overdue clarity on patterns of forest loss and palm oil expansion, including for smallholder palm oil, for the last 20 years. I have only a couple of minor comments for revision. There are obvious challenges in mapping such a complex land use system, especially for smallholders, but the authors are to be commended on employing such a comprehensive approach to validation and clearly presenting both commission and omission errors.

Two small comments

1. You report on Page 13 that “We were more concerned to note that Xu et al. (2020)14 reported a peak in expansion in 2016 but subsequent discussions with those authors suggested an artefact due to using multiple data sources with distinct and sometimes inconsistent properties (Xu et al. pers. comm. to Gaveau 2020).” Given the importance of this contrast and unpublished nature of the reference it would be helpful to include more detail on where the “sometimes inconsistent properties” are evident in the analysis by Xu et al.?

2. Page 17. Worth noting that as of 2021 the payment for results agreement between Norway and Indonesia has been terminated by Indonesia

********** 

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: Yes: David B. Clark

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: 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.

Slowing deforestation in Indonesia follows declining oil palm expansion and lower oil prices

PONE-D-21-26888R1

Dear Dr. Gaveau,

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: