Dear Dr. Benson,

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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• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Jianpeng Fan

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

1. When submitting your revision, we need you to address these additional requirements.-->--> -->-->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-->--> -->-->2. Thank you for stating the following financial disclosure: -->-->Master's Scholarship awarded to Hugh Benson which enabled him to conduct this research.-->-->Scholarship was awarded by Scion Research (https://www.scionresearch.com/) the New Zealand Crown Research Institute for Forestry. -->-->Scion had no input on methodology or results. One of the co-writers, Andrea Grant, is a Scion employee. Her primary role was as an editor, in which she suggested edits. No suggestions were made around changing results, nor would have been considered.-->-->A copy of these edit suggestions have been kept, and could be made available upon a reasonable request.-->--> -->-->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.-->--> -->-->3. Thank you for stating the following in the Acknowledgments Section of your manuscript: -->-->This article is part of the first author’s Master of Science in Psychology thesis from the University of Canterbury, New Zealand. Thanks are extended to the senior supervisor Don Hine, and co-supervisors Andrea Grant and Nicole Lindsay, all who contributed to the research process. Prof. Don Hine who was guided survey development, the writing process and gave feedback for the thesis. Dr. Andrea Grant and Dr. Nicole Lindsay were both influential in survey development, and gave feedback to convert the thesis into this article. -->-->Gratitude is also extended to the CRI for forestry Scion, for providing a Master’s Scholarship, which enabled the thesis project.-->--> -->-->We note that you have provided funding information that is not currently declared in your Funding Statement. However, funding information should not appear in the Acknowledgments section or other areas of your manuscript. We will only publish funding information present in the Funding Statement section of the online submission form. -->-->Please remove any funding-related text from the manuscript and let us know how you would like to update your Funding Statement. Currently, your Funding Statement reads as follows: -->-->Master's Scholarship awarded to Hugh Benson which enabled him to conduct this research.-->-->Scholarship was awarded by Scion Research (https://www.scionresearch.com/) the New Zealand Crown Research Institute for Forestry. -->-->Scion had no input on methodology or results. One of the co-writers, Andrea Grant, is a Scion employee. Her primary role was as an editor, in which she suggested edits. No suggestions were made around changing results, nor would have been considered.-->-->A copy of these edit suggestions have been kept, and could be made available upon a reasonable request.-->--> -->-->Please include your amended statements within your cover letter; we will change the online submission form on your behalf.-->--> -->-->4. Thank you for stating the following in the Competing Interests section: -->-->I have read the journal's policy and the author of this manuscript have the following competing interest: Hugh Benson was awarded a Master's Scholarship whcih enabled him to conduct this research. The scholarship awarder (Scion Research) had no input into methodology or reported results.-->--> -->-->We note that one or more of the authors are employed by a commercial company. -->--> -->-->a. Please provide an amended Funding Statement declaring this commercial affiliation, as well as a statement regarding the Role of Funders in your study. If the funding organization did not play a role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript and only provided financial support in the form of authors' salaries and/or research materials, please review your statements relating to the author contributions, and ensure you have specifically and accurately indicated the role(s) that these authors had in your study. You can update author roles in the Author Contributions section of the online submission form.-->--> -->-->Please also include the following statement within your amended Funding Statement. -->-->“The funder provided support in the form of salaries for authors [insert relevant initials], but did not have any additional role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The specific roles of these authors are articulated in the ‘author contributions’ section.”-->-->If your commercial affiliation did play a role in your study, please state and explain this role within your updated Funding Statement. -->--> -->-->b. Please also provide an updated Competing Interests Statement declaring this commercial affiliation along with any other relevant declarations relating to employment, consultancy, patents, products in development, or marketed products, etc.  -->--> -->-->Within your Competing Interests Statement, please confirm that this commercial affiliation does not alter your adherence to all PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials by including the following statement: "This does not alter our adherence to  PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.” (as detailed online in our guide for authors http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/competing-interests) . If this adherence statement is not accurate and  there are restrictions on sharing of data and/or materials, please state these. Please note that we cannot proceed with consideration of your article until this information has been declared.-->--> -->-->Please include both an updated Funding Statement and Competing Interests Statement in your cover letter. We will change the online submission form on your behalf.-->--> -->-->5. Please note that your Data Availability Statement is currently missing the direct link to access each database. If your manuscript is accepted for publication, you will be asked to provide these details on a very short timeline. We therefore suggest that you provide this information now, though we will not hold up the peer review process if you are unable.-->--> -->-->6. Your ethics statement should only appear in the Methods section of your manuscript. If your ethics statement is written in any section besides the Methods, please delete it from any other section.-->--> -->-->7. We note that this data set consists of interview transcripts. Can you please confirm that all participants gave consent for interview transcript to be published?-->--> -->-->If they DID provide consent for these transcripts to be published, please also confirm that the transcripts do not contain any potentially identifying information (or let us know if the participants consented to having their personal details published and made publicly available). We consider the following details to be identifying information:-->-->- Names, nicknames, and initials-->-->- Age more specific than round numbers-->-->- GPS coordinates, physical addresses, IP addresses, email addresses-->-->- Information in small sample sizes (e.g. 40 students from X class in X year at X university)-->-->- Specific dates (e.g. visit dates, interview dates)-->-->- ID numbers-->--> -->-->Or, if the participants DID NOT provide consent for these transcripts to be published:-->-->- Provide a de-identified version of the data or excerpts of interview responses-->-->- Provide information regarding how these transcripts can be accessed by researchers who meet the criteria for access to confidential data, including:-->-->a) the grounds for restriction-->-->b) the name of the ethics committee, Institutional Review Board, or third-party organization that is imposing sharing restrictions on the data-->-->c) a non-author, institutional point of contact that is able to field data access queries, in the interest of maintaining long-term data accessibility.-->-->d) Any relevant data set names, URLs, DOIs, etc. that an independent researcher would need in order to request your minimal data set.-->--> -->-->For further information on sharing data that contains sensitive participant information, please see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-human-research-participant-data-and-other-sensitive-data-->--> -->-->If there are ethical, legal, or third-party restrictions upon your dataset, you must provide all of the following details (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/data-availability#loc-acceptable-data-access-restrictions):-->-->a) A complete description of the dataset-->-->b) The nature of the restrictions upon the data (ethical, legal, or owned by a third party) and the reasoning behind them-->-->c) The full name of the body imposing the restrictions upon your dataset (ethics committee, institution, data access committee, etc)-->-->d) If the data are owned by a third party, confirmation of whether the authors received any special privileges in accessing the data that other researchers would not have-->-->e) Direct, non-author contact information (preferably email) for the body imposing the restrictions upon the data, to which data access requests can be sent-->?>

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: N/A

**********

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

The PLOS Data policy

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

Reviewer #1:  Initially, I’d like to congratulate the authors on the manuscript written. It has a good contextualization of the problem, the psychological variables that are used and the hypothesis of the study. I strongly recommend the publication of this article on PLOS One journal.

Nevertheless, I have some minor comments that may help the authors to enhance the quality of the study.

The tables were added to the article as image files, it’s necessary to insert the tables correctly, drawing the table with the tools provided by the app. This is a crucial thing to the forward steps of the article processing.

The data were analyzed with IBM SPSS and AMOS package. I strongly suggest to use updated softwares to the usage of Structural Equation Models (SEM), such as R and/or JASP (free access). Furthermore, it’s necessary to test the assumptions of the statistical analysis, to the correlation analysis, it’s necessary to test for normality of the distribution of the numerical variables, and for SEM models, it’s always necessary to test the multivariate normality,that is, considering all the variables that were considered in the study, this assumption can be tested with Mardia’s test.

If the assumptions for the correlation are violated, you should use the Spearman’s or the Kendall’s coefficient. In SEM models, you should use the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) estimator to ordinal data (Confirmatory Factor Analysis models), or Maximum Likelihood Robust in case the authors use numerical data (as in Path analysis)

Another good addition to the article would be the evaluation of the model fit of the scales, considering measurement models by SEM, that is, the Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA). In the methods section, the authors shows some psychometric indicators, but it’s not clear if they’re using indicators tested in another studies or if those indicators were calculated with the samples.

Based on this, I strongly suggest the authors to perform psychometric analysis to make sure that the scales used in the article fits to the data, considering the context in which they’re being used. Just after that the author’s could calculate a general score of the scales to use in the path analysis.

Reviewer #2:  1. This text is logically organized and easy to read and follow.

2. The rationale, procedure, and analysis are adequately articulated.

3. A. The study does not specify how participants from the Titirangi sample were recruited, raising concerns about potential selection bias.

4. Several limitations cannot be resolved at this stage; however, more detailed explanations and corrective strategies can be presented and discussed to guide future research.

a. The most significant issue is the low explained variance, which ranges between 11% and 16%. A more comprehensive discussion of additional relevant factors is necessary to account for this limitation.

b. The Cronbach's alpha for the NEP scale is 0.68, which is relatively low. How might future research explore alternative methods to enhance the reliability of this measure?

c. As the study relies on self-report data, there is a risk of misrepresenting actual behaviour. It is important to consider complementary methods that may help mitigate such inaccuracies.

d. Adapting the trust scale appears to lack validity in the specific context of kauri dieback, and using a logarithmic transformation requires a more robust justification.

**********

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: Yes:  Dr. Ali M. AL-Asadi

**********

[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.

Dear Dr. Benson,

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 Oct 25 2025 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.

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled '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,

Jianpeng Fan

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

1. If the reviewer comments include a recommendation to cite specific previously published works, please review and evaluate these publications to determine whether they are relevant and should be cited. There is no requirement to cite these works unless the editor has indicated otherwise. 

2. 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.]

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #3: All comments have been addressed

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

The PLOS Data policy

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

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

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

**********

Reviewer #2: I thank the author for taking the time to address all my comments adequately. I have no further comments.

Reviewer #3: no changes are needed. The authors have addressed the questions raised in the original article. Now the manuscript is more readable and comprehensive. It has now become more technically sound.

**********

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:  Dr. Ali M. AL-Asadi

Reviewer #3: Yes:  Gyanesh Kumar Tiwari

**********

[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

Understanding the Role of Psychological Distance in Preventing the Spread of Kauri Dieback

PONE-D-25-06009R2

Dear Dr. Benson,

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.

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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,

Jianpeng Fan

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments: