Dear authors,

the two reviewers were supportive of your manuscript and have made some useful suggestions, to which you have responded convincingly. Before submitting your revised manuscript please account also for the following issues:

1) In the text and several Figure legends you repeatedly use the term ‚Rh ratio’ to denote the proportional contribution of different soil layers / carbon sources to total Rh. To my knowledge the term ‚Rh ratio’ is not commonly used and might be misleading, as you actually refer to a fraction rather than a ratio. Also the wording ‚soil heterotrophic respiration (Rh) composition from soil organic carbon (SOC) pools distributed at different soil depths’ needs improvement, as a flux (Rh) cannot be ‚composed’ of different pools. You might want to refer to ‚Rh%’ or ‚Rh fraction’ and define it e.g. as ‚the relative contribution of Rh derived from different soil layers (Fig. 8+9)/ C pools (Fig. 10) to total Rh’.

2) In Fig. 1 you depict average summer and winter fluxes by a single line / colour, which is misleading given than winter fluxes were available only for two of the three sites. Please use distinctly different colours for the respective dataset for each site or the the respective average for each season.

3) As much as possible, please keep colour blindness in mind and avoid the parallel usage of green and red in the Figures (see http://www.biogeosciences.net/for_authors/manuscript_preparation.html).

4) In all Figures (incl. Figs. 5-10) composed of multiple panels grouped to letters a), b), c) etc. these should be listed and explained in the respective Figure legends. Thus you can also avoid using titles for the different panels.

5) Following common convention, please replace in the units ‚day’ by the symbol ‚d’ and ‚yr’ by ‚y’ throughout the manuscript.

I look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Best regards,

Michael Bahn