PONE-D-24-20245The influence of resource use on yield versus sale price

trade-off in Australian vineyardsPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Polley,

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.

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Alejandro F. Mac Cawley, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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“Mardi Longbottom is employed by Sustainable Winegrowing Australia.”

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6. We noted in your submission details that a portion of your manuscript may have been presented or published elsewhere. [Some of the same vriables such as water use, vineyard size and yield have been used along with further financial data and other environmental variables as part of a future research piece to model vineyard factor's interactions and how they relate to operating cost and revenue.] Please clarify whether this publication was peer-reviewed and formally published. If this work was previously peer-reviewed and published, in the cover letter please provide the reason that this work does not constitute dual publication and should be included in the current manuscript.

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Additional Editor Comments:

Dear Authors,

The reviewers are optimistic about the paper. However, they raise some issues that need to be addressed:

1. PONE has a policy requiring authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript available without restriction, with rare exceptions.

2. Reviewers require more detail on the data, results, and correlations.

3. Look into reviewer 2's proposal to divide the vineyards into clusters that share some similarities, such as size, geographical indicators, etc.

4. A discussion on the limitations of the results and further research is needed.

5. Proof check the document.

[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

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

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: 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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: 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: Please provide the dataset underlying your publication. Anonymized data should be provided for the factors yield, area harvested, year, GI region (anonymization: regions 1-55), water used, scope one emissions (subset 1) and average sale prices (subset 2).

Lines 63-64: please provide more information about how and in which occasion winegrowers provided their data in the web interface.

Lines 73-74: Please provide reference or provide regional average prices, which were used to complete the dataset.

Lines 123-124: Which limits were set in order to group the different regions into cool, hot, mild, warm, or damp, dry, very dry regions? Please add the information here.

Line 190: Please correct p=0.0.39

Fig. 4: Please convert into absolute numbers (yield [t ha-1]; average price [AUD ha-1]) to make results more transparent

Line 240: Please add that the strong negative correlation between vineyard size and average sale price could be due to regionally differing vineyard sizes - therefore please cancel lines 356-358.

Line 248: Please comment that scope one emissions are only responsible for a small portion of energy input in vineyards and other inputs significantly contribute to the carbon footprint of grape production. Please add further references (e.g. Rugani et al. 2013).

Please comment on the relation between temperature and yields in the discussion and add respective references for it.

Please insert a Figure caption for figure “yield verse value”. Are yields used here scaled to area? Please use absolute numbers [t ha-1]. Why did you choose to correlate yield*average price to it? Please use absolute numbers for depicting the correlation in order to make your findings more transparent.

Reviewer #2: The paper analyzes a database of 10 years and 1261 Australian vineyards. The authors seek to establish a relationship between resource use, yield, and sale price. The authors use five general linear models to capture the relationship of resources related to water and fuel use with the output yield and average sale price of the resultant product, taking into account the size and location of the vineyard. The R2 of the models are, in general, quite high. However, there are so many aspects of the problem that it is difficult to arrive at very useful conclusions, which would need to be more specific. It seems that it might be better to try to divide the vineyards into clusters that share some similarities, such as size, geographical indicators, etc. This might lead to more useful conclusions for the vineyard managers, like certain strategies that could be recommended for vineyards of a certain cluster.

The authors should also check for typos. I found "hoiwever" instead of however.

Reviewer #3: In this paper, the authors analyze the relationship between resource use, yield, and sales price using statistical models. Specifically, they unveil an interesting interplay between size, resource allocation, climate, and regional influences in shaping sales price and yield. Although the research topic is promising, and the paper meets the criteria for publication in PLOS ONE, it must be improved in some ways (just minor changes) to be publishable. Particularly:

1. In the introduction section, establish the contributions of this paper.

2. In the methods section, justify the choice of methods employed. A framework chart specifying inputs and output may be helpful to include.

3. In the result section, provide the p-values for all coefficients in Table 5 and reference properly the figures and tables provided in the Appendix.

4. In the discussion section, provide some practical implications of this study for winegrowers and wine supply chain management.

5. Finally, in the conclusion section, provide some promising subjects for further investigation.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

Reviewer #3: Yes: Mauricio Varas

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The influence of resource use on yield versus sale price

trade-off in Australian vineyards

PONE-D-24-20245R1

Dear Dr. Polley,

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 our manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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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,

Alejandro F. Mac Cawley, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

I am pleased to confirm that your paper "The influence of resource use on yield versus sale price trade-off in Australian vineyards" has been accepted for publication in Plos One.

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 #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: 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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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 #2: No

Reviewer #3: No

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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 #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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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 #2: The authors have done a very good job answering the questions and comments I noted in the first review. I have no further observations to the paper.

Reviewer #3: All of my concerns have been adequately addressed, and I therefore recommend acceptance of the paper.

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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 #2: Yes: Sergio Maturana

Reviewer #3: No

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