Adhesives free bark panels: An alternative application for a waste material

Charlett Wenig; Friedrich Reppe; Nils Horbelt; Jaromir Spener; Ferréol Berendt; Tobias Cremer; Marion Frey; Ingo Burgert; Michaela Eder

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0280721

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionSeptember 5, 2022
10 Oct 2022 Decision Letter - Yasir Nawab, Editor PONE-D-22-24770Adhesives free bark panels: an alternative application for a waste materialPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Eder, 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 Nov 24 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. 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Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. 5. 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 If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references.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 If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.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: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). 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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: Wenig et al provide a nice comperehensive study in which the properties of adhesive free bark panels from bark of different origin are investigated. The study is relevant in terms of the use of a waste material in bulk material application avoiding potentially toxic adhesives that are commonly used. The findings are clearly presented and the conclusions are sound. Publication in PLOS ONE is recommended and only some minor recommendations for improvements are provided: Introduction: -The author refer to studies performed in the mid-20th century but then give citations for manuscript in the 21st century. - When refering to the study by Burrows et al it seems relevant to mention the type of bar used (Douglas Fir). Results and discussion: - It took me a bit to figure out what the two pictures on the bottom of Figure 2a meant. I recommend adding a label - Also I recommend to add enlargement of the side view for the panels to clearly show that the boundry lines are visible (now this only is the case for Oak) - Figure 3 seems to be placed in the wrong section - Table 1 is not refered to in the section it is placed in - Table 1 column 4 should be density References: - Please check formatting, some could not be easily traced. - What is the footnote at the end of the references for? Reviewer #2: The work is well written and relevant. Correct methodology.The results were analyzed correctly. Some recommendations: objetives at the end of the introduction and put specific objetives. Methodology: cite the age, diameter and height of the trees. Reason for choosing species. Results and discussions: to discuss the relationship of the influence of tree diameter on debarking. Mention the thickness of the barks. Amount of phloem and periderm. Show the cells of the barks. ****** 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 Reviewer #2: 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.0280721.r001
Revision 1
28 Nov 2022 Author Response Dear Editors, First of all we wish to thank you for your time and efforts. In the following we are answering to the additional requirements. The answers to the reviewer comments are below. Sincerely yours, Charlett Wenig and Michaela Eder on behalf of all authors 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 Thank you for sending the instructions. We followed the guidelines. 2. We note that you have stated that you will provide repository information for your data at acceptance. Should your manuscript be accepted for publication, we will hold it until you provide the relevant accession numbers or DOIs necessary to access your data. If you wish to make changes to your Data Availability statement, please describe these changes in your cover letter and we will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide. We will activate the link, created in edmond, upon acceptance https://doi.org/10.17617/3.AZRWF3 and all the data will be accessible there. The µCT data will also be available in a compressed form. 3. PLOS requires an ORCID iD for the corresponding author in Editorial Manager on papers submitted after December 6th, 2016. Please ensure that you have an ORCID iD and that it is validated in Editorial Manager. To do this, go to ‘Update my Information’ (in the upper left-hand corner of the main menu), and click on the Fetch/Validate link next to the ORCID field. This will take you to the ORCID site and allow you to create a new iD or authenticate a pre-existing iD in Editorial Manager. Please see the following video for instructions on linking an ORCID iD to your Editorial Manager account: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xcclfuvtxQ The ORCID iD has now been validated in the Editorial manager. 4. We note that you have included the phrase “data not shown” in your manuscript. Unfortunately, this does not meet our data sharing requirements. PLOS does not permit references to inaccessible data. We require that authors provide all relevant data within the paper, Supporting Information files, or in an acceptable, public repository. Please add a citation to support this phrase or upload the data that corresponds with these findings to a stable repository (such as Figshare or Dryad) and provide and URLs, DOIs, or accession numbers that may be used to access these data. Or, if the data are not a core part of the research being presented in your study, we ask that you remove the phrase that refers to these data. Since the data is not shown in Figure 4 but accessible in the data repository, we changed to text to “data in repository”. 5. 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. We reviewed the reference list (changes not marked) and replaced 2 references by better fitting ones (in red) We also wanted to mention that Figure 2 and Figure 7 have been modified. Response to Reviewers' comments: Dear Reviewers, First of all we wish to thank you for your their time and efforts to read and carefully review our manuscript. In the following we will respond to raised questions, concerns and comments point by point. The changes in the manuscript are in red, a few corrected typos are not specifically marked. Sincerely yours, Charlett Wenig and Michaela Eder on behalf of all authors Reviewer #1: Wenig et al provide a nice comperehensive study in which the properties of adhesive free bark panels from bark of different origin are investigated. The study is relevant in terms of the use of a waste material in bulk material application avoiding potentially toxic adhesives that are commonly used. The findings are clearly presented and the conclusions are sound. Publication in PLOS ONE is recommended and only some minor recommendations for improvements are provided: Introduction: -The author refer to studies performed in the mid-20th century but then give citations for manuscript in the 21st century. Thank you for pointing this out! We removed the text relating to the 20th century since the more recent studies are more relevant. - When refering to the study by Burrows et al it seems relevant to mention the type of bar used (Douglas Fir). We agree that the bark type is important and added the information Results and discussion: - It took me a bit to figure out what the two pictures on the bottom of Figure 2a meant. I recommend adding a label we added a label and hope that it is clearer now - Also I recommend to add enlargement of the side view for the panels to clearly show that the boundry lines are visible (now this only is the case for Oak) the side view is now enlarged - Figure 3 seems to be placed in the wrong section we moved it to the appropriate section - Table 1 is not refered to in the section it is placed in we changed this - Table 1 column 4 should be density thank you, we corrected the column heading References: - Please check formatting, some could not be easily traced. We checked formatting - What is the footnote at the end of the references for? Here a formatting error occurred. The footnote is now at the end of page 2 in order to provide additional information related to historic bark use and its documentation (lines 49-51). Reviewer #2: The work is well written and relevant. Correct methodology. The results were analyzed correctly. Some recommendations: objetives at the end of the introduction and put specific objetives. We added some specific objectives towards the end of the introduction Methodology: cite the age, diameter and height of the trees. Reason for choosing species. The species were selected according to their availability in the vicinity of our research institution since one of the goals was to work with local trees. Since the aim of the present work was to explore the potential of local tree barks as a raw material for panels, age, diameter and height were not recorded as well as location of the bark within the tree. However, we observed a large variation in bark thickness, curvature etc both within and between trees. This is certainly a topic of future research and has now been included in the text. Results and discussions: to discuss the relationship of the influence of tree diameter on debarking. Mention the thickness of the barks. Amount of phloem and periderm. Show the cells of the barks. Thank you for your comment and your mentioned aspects are certainly interesting questions and should be addressed in the future. As written in the previous answer, the main goal of this work was a general exploration about the feasibility of using bark as a raw material to create panels. The µCT scans provide information about the cells in the barks, a detailed analysis phloem and periderm amount would require an elaborate sampling considering tree heights, ages, etc. and was beyond the scope of the present work. Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: response to reviewers.docx https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280721.r002
8 Jan 2023 Decision Letter - Yasir Nawab, Editor Adhesives free bark panels: an alternative application for a waste material PONE-D-22-24770R1 Dear Dr. Eder, 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, Yasir Nawab, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): 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 #1: All comments have been addressed ******** 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 #1: Yes ****** 3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: 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 #1: 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 #1: 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 #1: The authors have addressed the reviewers' comments in a satisfactory fashion. The manuscript can now be accepted for publication ****** 7. 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 ******** https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280721.r003
Formally Accepted
13 Jan 2023 Acceptance Letter - Yasir Nawab, Editor PONE-D-22-24770R1 Adhesives free bark panels: an alternative application for a waste material Dear Dr. Eder: 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. Yasir Nawab Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0280721.r004

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