Modelling the Incursion and Spread of a Forestry Pest: Case Study of Monochamus alternatus Hope (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) in Victoria

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript describes the main outline of a model to predict the spread of a forest pest insect after its arrival into a new area. As I understand, the manuscript is a more accessible and readable version of the model earlier presented and detailed in a technical report. It is easy to follow and understand the steps and concepts of the model and I really only have one major concern with the version at hand: In the model description, the full life cycle of the insect is worked through, but in the results only a snapshot of a dispersal event is presented. Did anything happen after the original individuals dispersed. I guess not (no mating or reproduction?), but in any case this should be made clearer in the introduction. Otherwise, the reader may expect more to come after the rather complete model description.

 

A couple of minor comments by row number:

47: Curculionidae

74: Curculionidae, not Scolytidae

186: There are two copies of Figure 3 in my document.

248-9, 257-8: distribution or density, pdf or PDF, or are they different?

302: Add “km” to the distance bar.

324: Figure 8. Text and numbers inside the figure are way too small! The red dots are more purple on my screen and printout.

328: Also here the font size is too small. Yellow dots are not easy to se unless you blow up the figure considerably.

343: It is mentioned that the population died out, and I think this should be revealed in the Results (see initial comment).

365: It not clear what “upward movement” refers to, please explain.

References: Numerous errors, please check carefully! Here are some:

408: Pinus  

417: Japanese

421: Boca Raton

435: Journal name in roman font

438: Japanese

443: Melbourne

447: European Union

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

 

Our Response

We have updated the manuscript encompassing all the reviewer’s comments.

All the suggested changes by row number have been implemented including further checking of the references which picked up additional errors.

We have made changes to Figure 7 – included km in the distance bar and made the positive dots in colour and more noticeable – also included insert map to put area of interest in relation to where it is in Australia (Reviewer’s 2 comment).

We have included additional statements regarding “what happened after the individuals dispersed”, in the abstract (Line 27), in the Materials and Methods section 2.10 (line 300-304) and in the discussion (353-357) including an additional figure (Figure 13).

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript by Weiss et al. ‘Modelling the incursion and spread of a forestry pest: case study of Monochamus alternatus Hope (Coleoptera: Cerambycidae) in Victoria’ describes a landscape scale, spatially explicit, spatio-temporal population growth and dispersal model of a generic invasive pine beetle. The model they describe permits user flexibility associated with inputs. The authors verified the model and its paremeters by simulating and comparing the outputs with the incursion of Monochamus alternatus in Melbourn and the outputs accurately predicted the distance and direction of the incursion. This model represents a sound contribution to the pest dispersal and biosecurity literature. Overall the manuscript is well laid out and written. There are some grammatical errors and typos that could be addressed in a thorough proof read. Below is a brief list of suggestions.

Line 37: change ‘pose’ to poses.

Line 170-171: correct sentence.

Line 185-190: The formatting is a little strange here, needs attention

Line 208-210: I see that you referenced another document here (16), but can you provide a brief statement on how robust the host dataset is, for example is mean trees/locations per sq km…

Line 302: Can you improve this figure a little bit, perhaps an insert with this location in regards to Australia for those less familiar. Also why use color in the earlier figures, but not this one?

Line 320: Can you please describe your statistical tests in more detail in the methods section. Your figure(s) show good convergence between your modeled and observed, however at first glance a significant test statistic would indicate significant variance of sorts between the two.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

We have updated the manuscript encompassing all of the reviewer’s comments. All of the suggested changes by row number have been implemented.

Review 2 - can you provide a brief statement on how robust the host dataset is, for example is mean trees/locations per sq km

We have included additional sentences about the robustness of the datasets (Line 125-127)

We have made changes to Figure 7 –including an insert map to put area of interest in relation to where it is in Australia and included colur.

In addition we have made changes to Figure 8 to make it more readable and clarify the information.

We have updated and described in more detail the statistical analysis in line 325.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx