https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2558-7111
Peer Review History
| Original SubmissionOctober 23, 2023 |
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PONE-D-23-34793Life tables in entomology: a discussion on table’s parameters and the importance of raw data.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Rossini, 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 Jan 26 2024 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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Please state what role the funders took in the study. If the funders had no role, please state: "The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript." If this statement is not correct you must amend it as needed. Please include this amended Role of Funder statement in your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf. 4. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: "The authors are grateful to Prof. Lidia Limonta and Prof. Daria Patrizia Locatelli for sharing the dataset analysed to show the core problem of this study. LR is funded by the European Commission under the Grant n. 101102281, Project “PestFinder”, call HORIZON-MSCA-2022-PF-01. Part of this work has been supported by the Fons de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS under the Grant n. 40003443 (“Smart Testing”)." 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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. [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 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: Yes 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: No 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: This paper presents a case study of the importance of raw data to the construction of life tables for modelling the development and emergence of insect pests, using a published dataset for a species of moth as a case study. The typical approach of using summary statistics (means, standard error) to model development, assuming that the data are normally distributed and therefore can be adequately represented by such values, is shown to miss important information and led to erroneous predictions. The authors therefore advocate for informing modelling efforts with raw data and that more studies in entomology to make their raw data available for future use. The points raised are valid and important, and the methods and analyses are valid, and the paper is well-written and novel. The importance of inter-individual variability, examining the actual distribution of data, and the push toward Open Data, are all in line with current trends in research. The paper will mainly be of interest to entomologists and agricultural scientists, although it will also have wider interest to developmental biologists and biostatisticians, and thus is appropriate for this journal. I believe this is an important paper that can and should be published, with some minor revisions and possible additional discussion points that I have noted below. Title: Should be “a discussion on tables’ parameters” or “a discussion on table parameters” Line 19: “a case of study” should be changed to “a case study” Line 44: “Change “each temperature of rearing” to “each rearing temperature” Line 47: Delete citation of [9] here, as it is cited below for the specific relevant points. Lines 67-69: More importantly, the transformation from development times to rates removes the infinities that occur at developmental threshold (min/max) temperatures. Lines 77 and 232: I think “ulteriorly” is incorrect or misleading here, it would be better to say “alternatively”. Line 147: It might be helpful to specify here that Figure 1 shows data specifically for the larval phase at a particular temperature, as an example of the non-normal distribution of data. Line 146: Change “accordingly” to “according” Equations 6 and 7, and Lines 226-227, and 231: The symbols of the parameters for the Gaussian distribution and its standard error (plus the alpha symbol that should be at line 231) have disappeared from the uploaded manuscript file – please ensure that these are included and visible in the future version(s) of the paper uploaded. Lines 241 and elsewhere: This should probably be “impulse response”, not “impulsive response” Lines 254-256: Should restate “We remind the most interested readers to” as “We refer the most interested readers to”. Also, one wonders if maybe some of these details should be included in the main Methods section of the paper, rather than in a Supplement – not full scripts, but the packages and functions used for the tests performed may be relevant to include. Figure 1: I was struck by the apparent bimodality of the data presented in Figure 1 – clearly this feature of the data would be lost through the use of simple Gaussian summary statistics (means, etc.) and presents a strong case for the use of raw data in this study. However, the bimodality of these data are not discussed in the paper, though multimodal behavior is mentioned briefly near the end as a general point (line 420). While somewhat beyond the main focus of the paper, one wonders how such bi/multimodality might emerge beyond just “genetic variability” – for instance, are there alternative developmental pathways or strategies (fast vs. slow growing) in the same population as a form of bet-hedging, could the eggs used have different developmental histories, etc.? Has such bi/multimodality been reported before, and how was it explained then? Perhaps the authors can draw attention to the bimodality of data in Figure 1 and provide a short (2-3 sentences) discussion of bi/multimodal development in insects in the paper? Lines 293-303: While directly working from the actual distributions of experimental data is likely the ideal approach to capture variation and non-normality in life table parameters, as done in this study, there are some alternative (and possibly simpler) approaches that might be worth consideration. The authors mention application of alternative distributions as one alternative approach here. A related method might be data transformation – for instance, in cases where data can be made normal/Gaussian following a mathematical transformation (logarithm, square-root, etc.) it may be reasonable to use the mean and standard error values of transformed data. This approach will have limitations (for example, it likely cannot help with bi/multimodal data), but may be worth discussing. Another method was recently published using Bayesian approaches, which may be worth reading, discussing, and citing – see Studens, Bolker & Candau, 2023, “Predicting the temperature-driven development of stage-structured insect populations with a Bayesian Hierarchical Model”, Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Statistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13253-023-00581-y Line 340: There are typos in the name of this species – it should be Chrysophtharta bimaculata (Olivier, 1807) [the year may be omitted in some publications, but note the spelling of the species’ part of the name and capitalization of Olivier] Line 344: What is “intra-genetic variability of the populations”? Maybe this should be “intra-population genetic variation”? Lines 358-367: Often data at more extreme temperatures and/or later developmental stages can be more variability and less normally distributed due to decreased sample sizes when individuals die or fail to develop beyond earlier stages. What is interesting about this study is that the dataset used has equal sample sizes across stages (Table 1) within each temperature group and excluded extreme temperatures where nor all stages could be completed (line 128 ff.), and yet the same sorts of patterns were still found. This may speak to something intrinsic in insect development actually being captured, rather than just methodological artefacts. I suggest the authors bring these points up in the Discussion. Reviewer #2: Authors provide strong arguments why the current standards around life table experiments and data may lead to important errors in models and decision support tools for pest control. Using one case study, they demonstrate that the unavailability of raw data, only publicly summarized y too coarse distribution metrics such as mean and standard errors are insufficient to accurately predict metrics of highest importance for decision support systems such as the mean generation time. This article is unambiguously of highest interest to the community of entomologists and deserves to be largely publicized. However, I have some main reservations, as well as a number of minor comments, listed below: 1/ the targeted audience is somewhat unclear, oscillating from mathematicians and modellers actually building the DSS tools and entomologists producing the primary data. While it is absolutely critical that the second group should be targeted by this paper, it somewhat misses its target at the moment, because it lacks relevant biological information: the consequences and main results should be clearly supported by illustrative examples biologically meaningful. For instance, what does it mean for an insect species if its development time distribution is bimodal versus gaussian ? Relative to the first group – DSS modellers: it is obvious that authors did not wish to push their study up to actually demonstrating the potentially catastrophic consequences of the systematic gaussian assumptions of developmental distributions on the success of pest management. However, this is a bit of a shame as it could probably have been done at minimal costs using even the most simplest DSS; one way around could be to provide more quantitative indications on how much these erroneous assumptions on distributions may crucially affect the accuracy, and therefore success of DSS tools. Put it simply: how do we care if a DSS might be 2-days wrong in predicting the peak of abundance of a pest ? 2/ how authors present the concept of distribution is somewhat limited, all mathematically (continuous), in terms of simulations (e.g., discrete individuals), and in terms of insect biology. For instance, it would be really useful and attract wider interest to relate simple characteristics of distributions to biological mechanisms. For instance, the minimum time laps between egg laying and egg hatching (ontogeny) is strongly determined genetically and biochemically due to a sequence of biochemical changes at the molecular and cellular level; injecting more biology would help entomologists understand why it matters to record and publish data in a more appropriate way. 3/ Inherent to the accuracy of the estimation of the distribution is the sampling size, which is never discussed throughout the paper, and clearly lacking. How much do the uncertainties arising from erroneous assumptions on distribution come from insufficient sampling size ? In other words, even if raw data are published, how much DSS outputs may be limited by initially insufficient sampling sizes, and therefore poor estimates around timing and other variables of key interest? 4/ the other side of the distribution/timing coin is the distribution/relative abundance aspect, never discussed either. What is more important for DSS accuracy: to predict the peak timing, or to predict the peak intensity ? The same goes to the spread of the distribution, barely touched, and which would be made more complex in a realistic scenario of overlapping generations/cohorts. 5/ The conclusion should rebound to the fact that the main conclusion most certainly hold true for other life-table metrics such as fecundity. Detailed comments: L20 “the Gaussian approximation of development time” L35, L73 and elsewhere. I was surprised to see the most recent synthesis paper by Chi et al. not cited here: Chi, H., Kavousi, A., Gharekhani, G., Atlihan, R., Özgökçe, M. S., Güncan, A., ... & Fu, J. W. (2023). Advances in theory, data analysis, and application of the age-stage, two-sex life table for demographic research, biological control, and pest management. Entomologia Generalis, 43(4), 705-35. https://doi.org/10.1127/entomologia/2023/2048 L39 “age-stage distribution” please provide a very brief definition L47-48 “net reproduction rate” please cite (and number) the corresponding equation. L82 What is mean by the “shape” of the distribution is unclear; in itself it may require multiple parameters to be described properly, depending on multimodality etc. L83-85 This sentence fails its goal: of course we want to know why and how the minimal and maximal development times and shape of distribution are important for planning pest control actions, but this sentence only says that “it is important”, not “how” it is important based on a specific example. More biology is needed here ! L86-88 It is certainly not true for other related individual-based metrics such as e.g. thermal limits CTmax, and for which a bunch of studies have been / are investigating the relationship between intraspecific genetic variability and adaptation potential. It would be worth mentioning some similar examples here, emphasizing that biologists in general, and entomologists in particular, do know how to research these questions and find compelling evidence that the shape of trait distribution does matter from an ecological to an evolutionary perspective. See e.g., Hoffmann AA, Chown SL, & Clusella-Trullas S (2013) Upper thermal limits in terrestrial ectotherms: how constrained are they?. Functional Ecology, 27, 934–949. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2435.2012.02036.x but many other references are available. L99 Mathematically and biologically, this is weird: at the individual level, there may be an experimental uncertainty on the estimate of the development time, but the mean and standard error of development times are population-level, not individual-level, metrics. This should be carefully clarified throughout. L101-102 I read this sentence about 5 times, still can’t make sense of it. Please rewrite. L106-113 this somewhat conclusion statement could be written more concisely: we got the point already and this will be repeated throughout. L160 “the peak”, but also the range !!! L169-173 This is too long and repeats information that has already been provided earlier; I suggest this should be written more concisely. L177-178 the concept of “system identification” is unclear. Please define with a practical example. The same goes to the “impulse response identification experiment in L179. L193 Z has not been defined... L199 “specific datasets of C. cephalonica” L209 How does the size of the dataset comes in there ? L213-216 This has already been said earlier L217-218 Add reference to figure 1 here L235-236 kurtosis and skewness in particular can be calculated mathematically in a variety of ways, what has been used here ? It would also be good to illustrate how this has been calculated based on a schematic representation or a real data distribution. L238-239 This statement is obvious and yet uninformative: what magnitude of deviation can be considered problematic, how far is “far” ? How should it be related to other intrinsic characteristics of data such as nominal time step and sampling size ? L251-256 This can be written more concisely: “For the sake of completeness, the shared scripts extend the analysis to all eight temperatures.. they also include the list of all software packages and functions...” L261-264 Already said before. L265-268 I do not think that this introduction to a sub-subsection of a relatively short paper is necessary. I suggest cut but reintroduce the missing details in the following paragraphs. L282 but also a shift in intensity/abundance as well… L285 “by the pupae” please check the structure of the sentence L290 Here it would be interesting to tell more about how these false assumptions based on data deficiency could make models outputs wrong, and how much wrong. L292&294 and other references “Wagner et al.” L302-303 But also accuracy on distribution shape is also constrained by sampling size no matter how many descriptive summary statistics are retained. L305 This is good, a very clear recommendation L310-312 The point has already been made and is clear from above, this is a repetition. L328 “gestation lengths of cattle” L328 “In this case, authors also plotted” L342 “missing the life traits of the single specimens”. What ? It seems to me that the English is awkward here, doubled by a nonsensical wording. L345 “availability of raw data” L351 “2 days” this should be related to biological knowledge L356 this is true only in the unrealistic case of non-overlapping generations/cohorts L363-364 this is tautological and nonsensical, and misses to provide a mechanistic explanation; simple biological stuff such as, the higher the deviation from optimal temperature, the larger the potential damage on the individual (which is often individual-dependent, e.g. in case of large inter-individual variation in size) and therefore the larger the variability in development time due to the induction of other biochemical processes (e.g., defences/protection) L365-366 this lacks references, this is very much a description of a bet-hedging strategy. Also lacks eco-evolutionary and biological context. L379 “the peak of the larvae occurred” is both awkward English and lacks accuracy – the word “gaussian” should be in there. L381 “anticipated the emergence of the first larvae” L379-383 differences in abundances – or spread /variation across individuals within the cohort should be discussed too. L392 How sensitive are the models and DSS to timing and abundance ? When will these erroneous assumptions and data deficiency matter or not ? L413 “Although life tables are important…” L421-422 you did show that this might impact the prediction capability although the “very negatively” is likely too strong since there is no quantitative statement on impacts on prediction capability/accuracy; in addition you did not show the quantitative consequences for the success of pest control; it would be good to elaborate more on this. L423 “A limit of this study is that it is based on” L424 “This however reinforces” FigS1 legend “quantile-quantile plot of the quantiles of the experimental data” In addition, I suggest using different line width and/or colours for continuous versus dashed portions, since it is currently quite difficult to visualized due to overplotting data points. Reviewer #3: The work questions the completedness of information provided by common life tables in the study of Entomology, using Corcyra cephalonica as case study. The experimental question posed by the authors is of paramount importance, and the data overall support the initial hypothesis that analyzing raw data and incorporating real data distribution plots is crucial to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of life table analyses. I have just minor concerns/remarks: • I believe that the manuscript would benefit from an English language revision to improve its proficiency. • I appreciate the fact that the authors mentioned the limitation of considering only one species (Lines 423-424). However, it would be better if the authors could add data from of at least one or two additional species. This addition would strengthen their conclusions. • I would like to emphasize the importance of considering longevity and/or mortality, given their importance in life tables. In my opinion, the inclusion of these aspects would significantly enhance the completeness of the study. • A critical aspect authors did not stress is that their assumptions are only true under controlled growing conditions. However, under field conditions, an insect’s development rate could be influenced by other factors, encompassing not only environmental factors, but also agronomic practices, biotic and abiotic factors, and interactions with other species. It would be appreciated if the authors add few lines in the discussion part to stress/highlight this aspect. Here some additional suggestions/comments: • Abstract (Lines 16-24): In my opinion, the abstract is relatively short (149 words), falling below the 300-word limit. I would like to suggest that the authors consider expanding it by highlighting the methodology adopted and the main results of the paper, in order to provide a more robust and comprehensive version. • Introduction: Lines 109-113 report some conclusions. I suggest removing it from the introduction section. • Acknowledgments (Lines 444-447): According to Plos One guidelines, funding sources should not be included in the Acknowledgments. • The references should be revised to adhere to the specified style, including the abbreviation of journal names. ********** 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: Brady K. Quinn 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. |
| Revision 1 |
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PONE-D-23-34793R1Life tables in entomology: a discussion on tables' parameters and the importance of raw data.PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Rossini, 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 Mar 25 2024 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:
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, Ramzi Mansour Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: 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. 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: (No Response) ********** 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: The authors have adequately addressed my comments and (in my opinion) those of the other reviewers, and the paper can now be accepted in its revised form. I commend them on putting together a great piece of work - I'm sure this will be an important paper in the field. Reviewer #2: Authors made a great effort to address all reviewers’ comment and incorporate changes in their article, which I believe are a significant improvement. I only have very minor comments below. L25 “the benefits” L30 “biological aspects” L31 avoid using “evolution” in a demographic sense. I recommend “changes in the population”, or even “demographic changes”. L31 “highlights this by” or “highlights this aspect by” sounded better L46 “the individuals in a population” or “from a population” L49 why did you remove “a” before cohort ? Are you sure this is correct English in current form? L54 “to obtain various information” L56 “The age-stage distribution describes… that compose the insect’s life cycle.” L76 “outside such thermal range” L123 “this is not yet common practice, which produces a loss” L124 “Remarkably, the unavailability of data”. A more offline comment here: a lot of papers publish a statement similar to “data are available from authors upon request”, notably because publishing data still remains a quite tedious, non straightforward and sometimes slow process, but most importantly also costly, and the community lacks general guidelines of the multiple ways to publish data. First, while this requires lots of efforts to collect data a posteriori from authors, I wonder how often authors do respond to these post-publication queries, is it something that the authors of the present paper have a sense of ? Second, wouldn’t it also be the role of publishers and journals to build up tools and guidelines about the so many available ways to publish data beyond the gold standards (e.g., Dryad), how are all the alternative (free github repositories, as supplementary materials of a publication, etc.) valid L135 does it really assume “identical”, or instead “interchangeable” as random draws of a single population ? A random draw does not assume identity, but representativeness. The distribution will be imperfect (unrealistic) in case the draw is too small relative to the size of the population, and in case the population itself is not representative of the species. I’m not very sure I agree with the following argument L135-137; bootstrapping will smooth-out the distribution and a distribution is always based on individuals’ traits, this last sentence as currently written seems to oppose bootstrapping to individual-based data, so I don’t understand… L147 “of insect population models”, I assume not all modellers deal with pests. L148 “exclusive usage of life tables’ synthetic information” L200 is it instead “implies that individuals from a single population can have two different developmental times” ? L316 “are both publicly” L369 “Furthermore, any synthetic parameters from descriptive statistics will always come with some loss of information” ********** 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: Yes: Brady K. Quinn 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. |
| Revision 2 |
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Life tables in entomology: a discussion on tables' parameters and the importance of raw data. PONE-D-23-34793R2 Dear Dr. Rossini, 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, Ramzi Mansour Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
| Formally Accepted |
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PONE-D-23-34793R2 PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Rossini, I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now being handed over to our production team. At this stage, our production department will prepare your paper for publication. This includes ensuring the following: * All references, tables, and figures are properly cited * All relevant supporting information is included in the manuscript submission, * There are no issues that prevent the paper from being properly typeset If revisions are needed, the production department will contact you directly to resolve them. If no revisions are needed, you will receive an email when the publication date has been set. At this time, we do not offer pre-publication proofs to authors during production of the accepted work. Please keep in mind that we are working through a large volume of accepted articles, so please give us a few weeks to review your paper and let you know the next and final steps. Lastly, 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 customercare@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. Ramzi Mansour Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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