March 19, 2016

Dear Dr. Mendonça,
Thanks for providing responses to comments by reviewers of your ms “Organic carbon burial efficiency in a large tropical hydroelectric reservoir ”.

I invite you to provided a revised version of the article considering comments of both referees and the following aspects:
1. Acknowledging previous work and show consistencies and inconsistencies such as studies by Sikar et al. (2009 and 2012), etc. is necessary for this journal, moreover if general issues are similar (organic carbon in sediments). If one novelty of your work is intensive sampling and more accurate estimates of carbon sequestration and gas emission, then those need to be compared to other reservoirs, both by area unit and as a whole and to other terrestrial systems such as lakes. There are estimates in the scientific literature.
2. Regarding to carbon burial efficiency values, What is the magnitude of this burial compared to lakes for instance? This will allow sustaining assessments such as “Being the first whole-basin assessment of OCBE in a reservoir, these results suggest that reservoirs may bury OC more efficiently than natural lakes. “
3. How do your CO2 and CH4 fluxes compare to other similar systems (dams, lakes, etc.)?
4. Please use “Mascarenhas de Moraes” instead MSM since use of non-standard abbreviations makes reading more difficult. Same with OCS (only used twice in text, except for table 1), OM, and SAR.
5. Page 18515, line 5. Carbon balance of what? Please explain

I am confident that you would have no trouble addressing these issues.

Sincerely your

Silvio Pantoja
Associate Editor

April 22, 2016

Editor Report bg-2016-536


Dear Dr. Mendonça,
Thanks for submitting a revised version of your article “Organic carbon burial efficiency in a sub-tropical 
hydroelectric reservoir ”. I am overall satisfied with your responses to reviewers but I would like to raise a few issues before publication in Biogeosciences:

1) Page 2, lines 2-4, line 29. Based on accuracy considerations, the concept of “Integrative (whole system) data” does not reflect the real meaning of your approach, which is sampling across a variety (probably most) of depositional local sedimentary environments within the reservoir to produce better estimates than previous work. In addition, I could argue that “whole system” will never be achieved unless we do a census (the “whole” system) and not merely sampling, that is feasible in geosciences. I am inviting you to rephrase accordingly. This rephrasing will not undervalue your work, but give accurate description for the scientific community.
2) Page 10, line 21. You probably mean “terrestrially derived sediment organic matter has been shown…” instead of “terrestrial sediment” that include inorganic matter
3) Page 14, line 22. Replace MSM with Mascarenhas de Moraes 



Looking forward to your response to those issues
Sincerely yours

Silvio Pantoja
Associate Editor