Dear Authors

I have now read the reviews of your submission and examined the evaluations of the authors. Overall the reviews are supportive, and your manuscript should be acceptable for publication after some revisions, which I will review.

In adjusting your manuscript, please respond to each point of the reviewers, and clearly annotate the changes.

Particularly address the following critical points:

Clearly address the issue of species-level responses, evaluating the generality of your model at species level, and the implications of community diversity on phenology. If the PFT concept is being challenged, what does this mean for your model, and its generality?

The model validation is not totally clear – I am expecting thousands of evaluations against NPN data, but see only a few dozen points in fig 3. Please clarify. The continental-scale validation is critical to explain, and needs to address bias, random error and correlation.

I agree with the reviewer that “p < 0.2 is a very generous threshold ”. I do not follow your response. Please think carefully about this issue.

I looked at the Buitenwerf paper and it seems to me there are comparisons that you could usefully make with their figure 2 and 3. Figure 2c might be at odds with your results, and would be worth discussing.

Please also examine the structure of the text to improve the focus of the Results section and provide a longer and separate Discussion section. This helps the readers

best wishes

Mathew Williams

Dear Authors

thank you for taking care to respond in detail and objectively to the comments of the reviewers, and my summary. The ms is now acceptable for publication, congratulations. Thank you for considering Biogeosciences for your submission.
best wishes
Mathew Williams