PONE-D-22-26139GAME BIRD CARCASSES ARE LESS PERSISTENT THAN RAPTOR CARCASSES, BUT CAN PREDICT RAPTOR PERSISTENCE DYNAMICSPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Hallingstad, 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.

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

Dear Dr. Eric Hallingstad,

Thank you for submitting your study to PLOS ONE.

Since late September, I requested 15 experts to review your submission PONE-D-22-26139.

Most of them were not avialable due to time shortage or conflicts of interest.

However, I received a constructive and excellent review from an expert in this research field.

I also read your submission and I agree with this reviewer - you have written and excelent manuscript based on a high quality research. Thus, I ask that you make changes to improve its quality even more, and publish a new (shorter) version in PLOS ONE.

Although there is NO LIMIT for manuscript length in PLOS ONE, I consider that your manuscript is too long. The reviewer has the same opinion.

The reading was a bit difficult due to this.

I suggest that you try to reduce the number of tables and figures, keeping only the major results, and the corresponding paragraphs.

As an expert in this research field, the reviewer suggested you to keep with the 3 objectives, and some additional minor suggestions also were provided. I suggest that you try to follow these major and minor suggestions. Please see below.

Due to the high quality and constructive review, I consider that we can advance with the evaluation process with only this review (what is allowed in this journal).

I ask that you check carefully the new numbers of figures and tables, and the corresponding text prior to submitting a corrected version.

Please feel free to contact me if you need additional time to provide a corrected version.

There are additional PLOS ONE instructions below that you might also consider. 

Dárius Tubelis, Ph.D.

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

Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 17 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,

Dárius Pukenis Tubelis, Ph.D.

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

"Will Vesely and Juan Botero served as the Renewable Energy Wildlife Research Fund’s (REWRF) project managers and provided valuable administrative support during our research.. This study was funded by REWRF."

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: 

"Funding for this research was provided to the authors (WEST, Inc.) by the Renewable Energy Wildlife Research Fund (REWRF; https://rewi.org/2022/03/24/research-fund-expands-to-solar-becomes-renewable-energy-wildlife-research-fund/). The funders had no role in data collection and analysis, or preparation of the manuscript. REWRF members reviewed the manuscript, approved the use of their existing data, and participated in the decision to publish."

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

3. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section: 

"I (EH) have read the journal's policy and the authors of this manuscript have the following competing interests: funding for the research was provided by the Renewable Energy Wildlife Research Fund. REWRF members reviewed the manuscript, approved the use of their existing data, and participated in the decision to publish. All authors work for Western EcoSystems Technology, Inc., an environmental consulting firm. There are no patents, products in development, or marketed products to declare. The above disclosures do not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, as detailed online in the guide for authors."

Please confirm that this does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, by including the following statement: ""This does not alter our adherence to  PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests).  If there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared. 

Please include your updated Competing Interests statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.

4. In your Data Availability statement, you have not specified where the minimal data set underlying the results described in your manuscript can be found. PLOS defines a study's minimal data set as the underlying data used to reach the conclusions drawn in the manuscript and any additional data required to replicate the reported study findings in their entirety. All PLOS journals require that the minimal data set be made fully available. For more information about our data policy, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability.

Upon re-submitting your revised manuscript, please upload your study’s minimal underlying data set as either Supporting Information files or to a stable, public repository and include the relevant URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers within your revised cover letter. For a list of acceptable repositories, please see http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-recommended-repositories. Any potentially identifying patient information must be fully anonymized.

Important: If there are ethical or legal restrictions to sharing your data publicly, please explain these restrictions in detail. Please see our guidelines for more information on what we consider unacceptable restrictions to publicly sharing data: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-unacceptable-data-access-restrictions. Note that it is not acceptable for the authors to be the sole named individuals responsible for ensuring data access.

We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

5. We note that Figures 1, 3, 8 and 9 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:

(1) You may seek permission from the original copyright holder of Figures 1, 3, 8 and 9 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].”

(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/

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: This is an interesting and well-written study that addresses a topic still understudied: the bias created by used of game bird carcasses (instead of wild specimens) in carcass persistence trials, and their impact on the accuracy of the estimates of bird fatality (more specifically of raptors) in post-construction monitoring studies. In addition to a meta-analyis, the authors created a mixed-effects model that predicts raptor persistence as a function of game bird persistence, which will be of great value for monitoring studies (in US) where raptor persistence data is absent.

I have, however, some reservations about the length of the manuscript (> 10,000 words, excluding tables) and the way the results are presented (looking more like a report than a research paper). For instance, if objective 1 is to “compare persistence times and probabilities for large raptor and game bird…”, why are not the results focused on that (3rd section of the “Field trial results”)? Is it necessary to describe separately and in such detail the persistence of raptors and game birds? The same for objective 2: raptor and game bird persistence really need to be described separately, or the focus should be on the “Patterns in raptor and game bird persistence”?

Another problem is the numerous tables included in manuscript, with some of the figures showing the exact same information (for details see my specific comments below).

In summary, and although presenting the methods and results in a descriptive way is generally regarded as a positive thing, here it makes the manuscript too long and hard to read, which ultimately diverts the readers’ attention from the results obtained for the 3 objectives set for the study.

Specific comments:

L. 35 – Unless you have read the paper, it’s not clear to what meta-dataset you are referring to.

L. 63 – I would say that it the opposite: “if the bias parameters are high”, meaning if the number of missed carcasses (by imperfect detection or removal), the no. of carcasses that fall outside or the no. of unsearched turbines are high, then the difference between the no. of carcasses found and the no. of fatalities estimated is greater. It would be “low” only if it had been previously explained (L. 60-62) that the bias-correction parameters (by which the observed fatality is divided) are the carcass persistence probability, the detection rate (by the observers), the proportion of carcasses that fall within the search area, and the proportion of searched turbines.

L. 90-91 – There has not been a through investigation of persistence data from raptors only, or game vs. wild specimens… But for birds in general there are several studies that have compiled and investigated persistence data from more than a single site, or a small number of sites (e.g., Barrientos et al 2018; Smallwood 2013, doi:10.1002/wsb.260; Bispo et al. 2013, doi: 10.1007/s10651-012-0212-5).

Figure 1 and 3 - Image resolution isn't high enough (it looks pixelated).

L. 176 – The use of the word “fresh” here may be misleading since all carcasses were frozen and then thawed before the trials.

L. 200-202 / 207-209 – Include reference or explain why this threshold was used.

L. 221 – Not sure why the data from cameratraps had to be “consistent with the in-person checks”, if the R-package “GenEst” was used (see comment to L. 261-276). GenEst can accommodate data both from weekly visits (in-person checks) and from smaller time intervals (cameratraps), as long as a “LastPresent” time and “FirstAbsent” time if provided for each carcass.

L. 257 – Replace “or” by “of”.

L. 261-276 / 316-330 – Were theses analyses done using the GenEst R-package [33]? It is not clear since Ref. 31 to 34 are always cited together, while for the 3rd analysis (“scaling game bird persistence”) it is clearly stated.

L. 378 – Start of stage 2?

L. 396-397 - This last step of stage 2 is not represented in Figure 3, is it?

Tables 3, 5, 7 and 8 – To reduce the extended number of tables in the MS, please consider the possibility of moving these 4 tables to Supplementary material, as the best supported models for raptor and game persistence are stated in the text, both in objective 1 and 2.

Table 4 and 6 / Figure 4 to 7 – These tables and figures show the exact same information, right? I would suggest moving Tables 4 and 6 to Supplementary material, with the estimated values still being available for those who may need it.

Tables 9 and 10 – These tables are too long and, consequently, difficult to read… Please considerer moving them to Supplementary material, and better explaining (L. 582-87) why you used the 30-day interval as a showcase your overall results (Fig. 10).

L. 522 – I suggest turning this section into a 2nd-level heading, for a better correspondence between the three study objectives (established in the Introduction section) and the structure of the Results section.

L. 763-766 – The persistence of road-kills is highly influenced by traffic; thus, it is not comparable with carcass persistence dynamics at WEFs and power lines, where removal occurs mostly due to scavenging or decomposition.

**********

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.

GAME BIRD CARCASSES ARE LESS PERSISTENT THAN RAPTOR CARCASSES, BUT CAN PREDICT RAPTOR PERSISTENCE DYNAMICS

PONE-D-22-26139R1

Dear Dr. Eric Hallingstad,

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,

Dárius Pukenis Tubelis, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Dear Dr Eric Hallingstad,

Congratulations on your excelent study.

I have read your corrected version, and I consider that it should be accepted

for publication in PLOS ONE. It is very well organised and written.

This is because you provided appropriate responses and changes to the reviewer´s suggestions.

The text was shortened as we requested, and it is easier to read now.

All figures and tables were appropriately cited and placed in the text.

The same occurs with the supplementary material, that reduced the text.

I found no typing errors in the text. Please check this again when correcting the proofs.

However, I found some minor problems in the references section.

Please point out these problems when you do the proof checking:

Ref. 03. Please add the DOI.

Refs 05 and 36. Delete one dot point after "et al". There are two, and should be only one.

Ref. 10. Delete the dot after "S".

Ref. 16. Delete the dot after "G".

Ref. 34. What year is correct ?

Refs. 48-50. They have DOIs. Please add. Just copy their titles to the Google to get them.

Ref. 54. Please delete "Accessed".

Add other necessary changes if you find them.

Dárius