Peer Review History

Original SubmissionAugust 24, 2022
Decision Letter - Daniel de Paiva Silva, Editor

PONE-D-22-23711

A multispecies corridor in a fragmented landscape: evaluating effectiveness and identifying high-priority target areas

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. DeMatteo,

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.

Specifically, the reviewer has provided some minor comments which need to be addressed. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 16 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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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Daniel de Paiva Silva, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

1. We noticed you have some minor occurrence of overlapping text with the following previous publication(s), which needs to be addressed:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0183648

In your revision ensure you cite all your sources (including your own works), and quote or rephrase any duplicated text outside the methods section. Further consideration is dependent on these concerns being addressed.

2. Please include your full ethics statement in the ‘Methods’ section of your manuscript file. In your statement, please include the full name of the IRB or ethics committee who approved or waived your study, as well as whether or not you obtained informed written or verbal consent. If consent was waived for your study, please include this information in your statement as well.

3. We note that Figures 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, 4a and 4b 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:

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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/

4. 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 (if provided):

[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

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

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

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear Authors,

Congratulations on producing a great piece of work. The extensive surveys are to be commended and the dataset generated is incredible. I found the manuscript to be an enjoyable read, and the methods and anlayses appropriate. Well done! I recommend your work should be accepted with only minor revisions (see attached).

Kind regards,

Ana Gracanin

PhD Candidate

Centre for Sustainable Ecosystem Solutions

School of Earth, Atmospheric and Life Sciences

Faculty of Science, Medicine & Health

University of Wollongong NSW 2522 Australia

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If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: PONE-D-22-23711_reviewer - AG comments.docx
Revision 1

Reviewer comments:

All suggested word changes in the document were made, with a few exceptions. A general note: in the references at the end of the manuscript and in the appendix, there were multiple notes for formatting in Italian; however, no actual changes to the text were noted, so no changes were made in this section. The exceptions were:

1) Line 85: The use of “its” is appropriate in this case, as it indicated possessive, with Misiones being the region’s National Capital of Biodiversity. “It’s” would be incorrect, as an abbreviation of “it is” is not appropriate here.

2) Line 219: The use of “was” versus “were” is correct in this instance, as it is referring to the ‘neighborhood scale’, which is singular.

3) Line 240: The use of “was” versus “were” is correct in this instance, as it is referring to the ‘efficacy’, which is singular.

4) Line 267: The use of “fit” versus “fits” is appropriate and follows the rest of the paragraph where “fit” is considered appropriate.

5) Line 303: The text was not changed to “suitability levels reported”, as this would remove consistency for future sections in the Discussion (page 28 and page 30) where the results are discussed relative to “levels of suitability”. The change is a wording preference versus a change of meaning.

Editor comments:

1) Overlapping text: Per an email on 29 November 2022, Publication Assistant Alexis Miller noted that a review of the text found the overlap of text to be within the methods section. Therefore, the text of manuscript is acceptable under PLOS policy (Case 07798633).

2) An ethics statement was added, noting no verbal or written permission is required by the Saint Louis Zoo’s IACUC committee.

3) Question about copyrighted map images: Per an email on 7 December 2022, Publication Assistant Alexis Miller noted that a review of the journal policy did not find any potential copyright concerns regarding the figures in question. Therefore, the figures in the manuscript are acceptable under PLOS policy (Case 07798633).

4) Review of reference list: A review was made and no citations have been retracted.

Attachments
Attachment
Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.docx
Decision Letter - Daniel de Paiva Silva, Editor

A multispecies corridor in a fragmented landscape: evaluating effectiveness and identifying high-priority target areas

PONE-D-22-23711R1

Dear Dr. DeMatteo,

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,

Daniel de Paiva Silva, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Dear Dr. DeMatteo,

I am pleasured to inform you and your co-authors that your manuscript has been formally accepted for publication in PLoS One. Both reviewers agree that improvements were made to the new version of the manuscript and one of them suggested that new figures with better resolution are prepared and added to the manuscript. Once again, congratulations on your efforts to improve the text.

Sincerely,

Daniel Silva

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

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: 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

Reviewer #2: 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: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: The manuscript addresses an important issue and emphasizes the importance of using multispecies corridor to select target areas in fragmented landscapes that require different management strategies of restoration, preservation, or both.

I appreciate the opportunity of reading your manuscript. Methods analysis were carried out carefully, reflecting the expertise of the authors. Please, I just suggest to check the resolution of the figures to have the best quality to final publication.

Finally, I congratulate you on the presentation of results and discussion, and the study of such relevant topic of finding solutions to prioritize conservation areas considering several species. In my opinion, the manuscript is ready to be published.

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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

Reviewer #2: No

**********

Formally Accepted
Acceptance Letter - Daniel de Paiva Silva, Editor

PONE-D-22-23711R1

A multispecies corridor in a fragmented landscape: evaluating effectiveness and identifying high-priority target areas

Dear Dr. DeMatteo:

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. Daniel de Paiva Silva

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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