Dear Dr van der Perk,

Many thanks for your responses to reviewers and outline of edits on your manuscripts as well as clarifications. I have conferred with the referees and am happy that you have addressed all concerns raised by them adequately. Please implement the edits you outline in our responses into a revised manuscript, which I look forward to receiving.

With best wishes,
Jens-Arne Subke

Dear Dr. van der Perk,

Many thanks for submitting the revised manuscript. I am happy with the changes to the text, but would like you to improve the clarity of the figures. Please se below for my comments, which I hope you will find easy to implement. If any of these are not clear, please don’t hesitate top contact me.

With best regards,
Jens-Arne Subke


• Avoid showing a legend in the graph, and instead explain coding of lines/symbols in the legend. The use of colours is not ideal, and you should use different line styles or symbols to distinguish between series. All series should still be distinguishable when printed in black-and-white, so use combinations of line style, thickness and shade to make distinctions.

• Fig. 1: Remove one decimal point from all y-axis labels (only show the maximum number of decimal places necessary). You could consider limiting the number of ticks on each axis, which would aid clarity further – 4 or 5 ticks & labels are sufficient.

• Fig. 2: Same as above – fewer decimal places, consider fewer ticks, and no legend within the graph. I was wondering if graphs showing actual SOC (in g m-2) would be more informative (i.e. multiply % SOC by soil mass of 20 cm depth soil using respective bulk density values). In case you prefer to keep SOC as %, please make it clear in the figure legend that this is % of soil mass, not a percentage of initial pools or total organic matter. (An earlier table uses % both for SOM content and for changes in SOM content, which can cause confusion). I’m happy either way, as long as your caption makes it clear what is being shown.

• Fig. 3: Remove un-labelled tick marks as well as the horizontal lines in the chart area. The axis title is confusing – is this the change in SOM expressed as % of initial state, or the actual decrease in soil organic matter content? I suggest deleting the word “absolute” in the axis title and making it clearer what is being shown in the figure legend. Also here, please try to use colours in a way that allows difference to be recognisable when seen as black and white (e.g. making one of the bars an ‘open’ bar with just an outline, one a solid dark colour, and one a solid light colour).