Retraction: Land use land cover change as a casual factor for climate variability and trends in the Bilate River Basin, Ethiopia

Abstract

Full text

Following publication of [1], concerns were raised that this article contains a substantial degree of overlap with a previously published article [2] by the same authors, including almost all article text, reported methodology, equations, datasets and quantitative results.

On the basis of PLOS’ editorial assessment, the PLOS One Editors consider the extent of overlap is such that this article [1] constitutes a redundant publication. The corresponding author stated that prior to publication of [1] they requested to withdraw the accepted manuscript from PLOS One after the other article [2] was published; however, PLOS determined the request was not sent to a functional email address.

The PLOS One Editors retract this article [1] because, per our editorial assessment, it does not meet PLOS One’s second publication criterion [3].

SSB did not agree with the retraction. EV either did not respond directly or could not be reached.

The entire article [1] reports material similar to that published in [2] under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license with some modifications. The earlier published article [2] was not cited in [1]. Source and licensing information for the map images in [1] was not provided in figure captions. Based on information provided during the manuscript submission process, Fig 1 is generated from OpenStreetMap and a shapefile obtained from the Ethiopian Geospatial Institute (EGI); Fig 3 is generated from freely available Landsat 5 MSS and Landsat 7 ETM+ provided by the U.S. Geological Survey archive; Fig 4 is generated from freely available Landsat 8 provided by the U.S. Geological Survey archive.