Peer Review History
Original SubmissionFebruary 11, 2023 |
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PONE-D-23-04032Building a community-based open harmonised reference data repository for global crop mappingPLOS ONE Dear Dr. Boogaard, 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. Discrepancies in datasets for different years and effect on classification; Provide details on the other crops and how they impact the classification accuracy; Provide details on weights of confidence score calculation; Explanations on the imbalances in geographical coverage w.r.t. WorldCereal reference data; Justification on why type of farms or field size not included, etc. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 01 2023 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:
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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. 10. Please include captions for your Supporting Information files at the end of your manuscript, and update any in-text citations to match accordingly. Please see our Supporting Information guidelines for more information: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/supporting-information. 11. 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: Dear Authors, We have received the comments from two different reviewers. Both suggested minor revisions. Their comments are included for your perusal. We look forward to the revisions. Best, Krishna [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). 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 ********** 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 ********** 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: Review PLOS One Title: Building a community-based open harmonised reference data repository for global crop mapping Manuscript ID: PONE-D-23-04032 Groundtruthing data, also called Reference data, is key to produce reliable crop type and cropland maps. However, collecting the reference data is notoriously challenging, expensive and time-consuming. This paper documents the process to build a community-based, open, harmonised reference data repository at global extent, ready for model training or product validation. The repository holds around 75 million harmonized observations with standardized metadata of which a large share is available to the public (except some which could not be shared due to the restrictions by the original data owners). This is a huge effort by the authors and their institutes. It is a huge contribution to the community. The data could be used for either the calibration of image classification deep learning algorithms or the validation of Earth Observation generated products, such as global cropland extent and maize and wheat maps. We should than the World Cereal project which is funded by European Space Agency (ESA).The paper is well-written and the repository is accessible. I would recommend acceptance with minor revisions. I listed my (mostly) minor comments below: 1、 In Table 2, the collected data sets covered different years. The land cover types, particularly crop types usually change from year to year and sometimes the changes are considerable. If the datasets are used for classification, how to deal with the time/year difference? How to use these old samples for in-season classification for the current year? 2、 In Figure 3b, the percentage of other crop types is 60.5%. What are other crop types? The percentages of crop types are very imbalance. Will this affect the classification accuracy? 3、 Confidence score is very important for data fitness. Three individual scores on spatial, temporal, and thematic accuracy are averaged using specific weights. These weights allow to vary the importance of the three types of accuracy. How to calculate the weights of confidence score? Reviewer #2: The WorldCereal project has done a great work of collecting, harmonizing and sharing reference data for crop mapping at the global scale. The quality of the data has been assessed following several criteria and the supply of a confidence score together the data is really appreciated. Overall the paper is well written and presents in an understandable and transparent way the worklow. I have some minor comments below : 1) The WorldCereal reference database is strongly unbalanced in terms of geographical coverage (UE mainly). Even if it is a bit discussed, more discussion is needed on that point and particularly on what implication for global mapping (which is the main purpose of this database)? 2) In terms of information provided in the database, there is the land cover, crop type and irrigation status. I was wondering why information such as the agroecological systems or the type of farms (smallholder, medium, large, cf. Samberg 2016) or the field size (Fritz 2015) have not been included since it could help to refine crop mapping? 3) L143. Table 1. How the crops such as sugarcane or cassava that can have a crop cycle that can last up to 24 months have been considered? From your Table 1, annual cropland is for a period of 12 months but can we considered sugarcane or cassava as perennial crops? Not sure. 4) L150-151. How have you dealt with the case of cropping season spanning two calendar year? 5) L226. The Y-axe label of Figure 3 is a bit confused. A total number is not a percentage. 6) L269. Typing error at WorldCereal. 7) L270. In your table 2, there are several data-sets with year starting in 2016. Along your document you mention at many places that only the data from 2017 are collected. This is a bit confusing. ********** 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". 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Revision 1 |
Building a community-based open harmonised reference data repository for global crop mapping PONE-D-23-04032R1 Dear Dr. Boogaard, 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, Krishna Prasad Vadrevu, Ph.D 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: N/A ********** 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: It is a great paper, and I had mostly minor comments with minor revisions. You addressed them well. Congratulations! ********** 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 ********** |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-23-04032R1 Building a community-based open harmonised reference data repository for global crop mapping Dear Dr. Boogaard: 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 Krishna Prasad Vadrevu Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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