Prof J. M. Micklemore
Editor in Chief
Journal B
18th April 2015
Dear Prof Micklemore,
We’ve just reviewed a paper by Huntingdon et al. titled ‘Global warming increases the rate of emergence of new zoonoses’. On the basis of these reviews our editor (Dr. Anne Ryan) thought that the paper would be a good fit for your journal. I’ve attached a pdf of the manuscript to this email; the reviewer comments are below.
Please let us know what you’d like the authors to do:
1) address the reviewer comments, prepare a ‘response to reviewers’, and submit to your journal;
2) send the paper somewhere else. We are also happy for the authors to submit to you without revising their paper.
We like to provide our authors with a speedy service, so please try to respond as soon as possible. If we haven’t heard after 5 working days, we’ll assume that the answer is ‘2’ and refer the paper elsewhere.
If you would like the authors to submit to your journal, please feel free to include additional comments to them in your response to this email.
Yours sincerely,
Tim Vines
Managing Editor, Axios Review
[email protected]
Editor Comments (from Anne Ryan)
This paper has been evaluated by three reviewers. Overall, the reviewers and I think it would be a good fit for Journal B. In contrast to Ref 1, I do think the ENM analysis is a worthwhile addition to the paper, but I agree it needs a more detailed explanation.
Reviewer 1 (Gerald Knapp)
Comments on the paper:
This paper examines whether the rate of emergence of new zoonoses from wild animals can be related to local climatic trends. The study uses WorldClim environmental data to identify regions where climatic conditions have changed most in the last fifty years, and then compares these locations with the emergence of new zoonoses from wild animals. Intriguingly, the authors find a moderate correspondence between areas with dramatically increased rainfall and new zoonoses. The authors then use Ecological Niche Modeling to predict where we might expect to see a higher rate of emerging zoonoses in future. In general, I found the paper interesting and well presented. The central analysis relating climate to zoonosis emergence seems solid and the authors go to commendable lengths to control for other factors. I was also fairly convinced by the ecological niche modeling section. However, given the strength of the main result and the inevitable difficulty of combining uncertain climate prediction with rare and sporadic event like disease emergence, I wondered whether this analysis might be better placed in a separate paper. If the authors do decide to retain this analysis, I think they need to be more thorough in explaining the steps taken during the analysis, perhaps in a supplemental file.
I have a number of more minor comments:
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Suitability for Journal B:
I thought that this was a very strong contribution and I could certainly see it appearing in Journal B. However, the authors would need to add more detail to the description of Ecological Niche Modelling as not all readers of Journal B will be familiar with this approach.
Reviewer 2 (Yuki Magoya)
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Reviewer 3 (Annette Sherwin)
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