As already mentionned, a very long time elapsed (more than two years)
between the invitation we received from Robert and the actual submission
of the first completed draft. Partly because of this delay and partly because the journal was undergoing organizational changes at the time (I later learned), our
manuscript was not handled by Robert but by another Subject Editor, who
remained anonymous. I will always remember the moment when I received and read
the decision letter from the journal. I was so devastated and, of
course, angry because the work I devoted to the journal was rejected
without invitation to resubmit. This was tough. Of course, some of the
criticisms of the reviewers were justified but nothing that we could not handle in a revised
version, for sure. So, I decided to put the decision letter aside for
several days, just the necessary time to calm down before writing a
thoughtful rebuttal letter to the journal asking for reconsideration, and inquiring why our manuscript
was not handled by Robert K. Colwell who formerly invited us to write
this review. In the anonymous Subject Editor’s defense (but despite our original cover letter), he or she apparently did not appreciate that the paper was a literature review, and rejected it in part because there were no novel findings. As it happened, the anonymous Subject Editor was unable to handle further consideration of the manuscript, and Robert was asked by the Editor in Chief of the journal to consider our request for reconsideration. The manuscript was sent out
to review again and eventually accepted after minor revisions, based on the new reviews. At the end, our
perseverance paid off and the paper was published in Ecography \citep*{Lenoir2015} (currently 145 citations in Google Scholar),
picked up by several news outlets and even recommended in F1000 Prime by
Lee Frelich. So, the moral of
this backstory is never give up.