Spatial Analysis of Mosquito-Borne Diseases in Europe: A Scoping Review
, Jorge Rocha 2, Alberto Gomes 1, Bernardo Gomes 3,4 and Ana Isabel Ribeiro 3,5,6
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The article is well structured. It addresses a significant concern. The structure, selection of topic, and data collection regarding the literature have been greatly appreciated. However, some points have to as reported below be clarified or fixed.
1. The authors should check the whole manuscript for grammatical errors
2. It is better to add "doi" for each of the references (The lack of the same may be due to the Endnote)
3. The study should require recent references, currently, the study is reported with few recent references, especially in 2022. So the authors should add enough recent studies in 2022 to support their focus.
detailed comments:
Abstract
It is essential to include the udated infection rate (2022) OF major mosquito borne diseases in the study area .
Include at least one spatial modelling technique in the below mentioned sentence.
“Most of them used geographical cor-28 relation analysis (n=50) with a wide range of spatial modelling techniques”.
The authors should have to add the various software that are primarily used for the major focus of this study.
Introduction
Page 2 L 48-50: Add reference for the sentence.
Page 2 L 49-54:Try to focus on mosquito vectors rather than other organisms, since the paper have prime significance towards the mosquito born disease.
Page 2 L 56-59: Why don’t you consider the same perspective in European provinces? The authors should have provided the statistical shreds of evidence that strongly support the same perspective in a European perspective.
Page 2 L 65-69: The scientific names should be italicized. Why the authors have don't provide enough consideration in maintaining the scientific style? Does it falls belongs to a technical accident? Authors should have to consider the same aspect for the whole manuscript.
Page 2 L 76-78: How can you say that the study that you have cited is recent since it was published in 2019? Rewrite the sentence.
2. Materials and Methods
Page 3 L 104 recent (re)introduction of the mosque, check for punctuational error
Page 3 L 113-115 Try to elaborate the research problem.
Page 3 L 135-136 Provide citation
Results
If possible, the authors should add which are the major software that was used in many of the studies to accomplish the targets.
For the all sentences in the result part, The scientific names should be italicized. Why the authors have don't provide enough consideration in maintaining the scientific style? Does it falls belongs to a technical accident?
Discussion
The authors should incorporate specific contents in the discussion part to rectify the concern linked with the following questions.
Which GIS software?
Why don’t you include a discussion concerning the applicability of software in spatial analysis, since most spatial analysis primarily focused on Computer-aided techniques/software? Hence it is mandatory to include a specific discussion concerning the aforesaid problem.
CONSIDER THE SAME TOWARDS GAP, STRENGTH AND CONCLUSION
Rewrite the sentence : The most frequently studied vectors and infections were Dengue, Malaria, 340 Chikungunya and West Nile Virus, and the most widely studied ecological determinants 341 were temperature and precipitation, as well as water bodies and vegetation. Authors need to either include the various vectors for the disease transmission or delete the vectors.
The length of the discussion was found very less, try to discuss from different perspectives based on novel inferences along with recent studies, and the authors should expand the discussion part with additional 2 or 3 pages of content.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
We are glad to know that our manuscript was considered potentially acceptable for publication in Sustainability subject to the requested minor revision. We would like to thank you the opportunity to revise and improve our manuscript. Under to this letter is our point-by-point response to the reviewer 1 comments.
We have also revised and uploaded the new manuscript file (a manuscript with tracked changes is also provided).
We hope that the revised manuscript now meets all the requirements for publication.
We thank you in advance for your consideration and look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours faithfully,
Sandra Moutinho
On behalf of the co-authors
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This paper is a PRISMA-style examination of geographical analyses of mosquito-transmitted diseases in Europe. I have a few elements the authors should address before publication
1. The justification for the study area is poor. Mosquitos are not particularly well established in much of Europe (largely due to climatic factors, which the authors note are slowly shifting due to climate change). This mismatch on mosquito prevalence and study area also results in unsurprising or uninformative results about how Northern and Eastern European countries often lack subnational analysis.
As the study area is the underlying basis of the manuscript's work as well as its primary recommendation of greater detail in geographic analysis in this region, without a far more powerful justification that is interwoven through the document, the usefulness and contribution of this document is likely to be low.
2. The authors exclude an enormous percent of their matched papers, and their reasons are vague - what percent are due to a lack of full text and/or other inclusion criteria?
3. There are a plethora of connections to many of the recommended study topics around the world, and the lack of consideration of the global context of the mosquito disease literature shows here. Is there a reason to think that Europe will have a dramatically different linkage between disease and SES? Why?
4. A smaller element - Figure 4 might improve dramatically if you inverted which elements were the slices and which were the bars.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
We are glad to know that our manuscript was considered potentially acceptable for publication in Sustainability subject to the requested minor revision. We would like to thank you the opportunity to revise and improve our manuscript. Under to this letter is our point-by-point response to the reviewer 2 comments.
We have also revised and uploaded the new manuscript file (a manuscript with tracked changes is also provided).
We hope that the revised manuscript now meets all the requirements for publication.
We thank you in advance for your consideration and look forward to hearing from you soon.
Yours faithfully,
Sandra Moutinho
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
