Dear authors,
many thanks for your responses. Please submit a suitably revised version of the manuscript. When revising the manuscript, please pay particular attention to citing all the relevant literature.
Best,
Sönke

Dear authors,

many thanks for your revised manscript. After reading the revised manuscript along side your reviewer responses, I regret to inform you that further minor revisions are required before the manuscript can be accepted for publication in Biogeosciences.

While I can see that you do not want to invest into gathering C:N ratio, I agree with reviewer #1 that this would have improved the impact of your manuscript substantially. This is of course your decision. However, either in the introduction or discussion you need to explain why you have omitted one of this easily measurable and relevant measure of nitrogen status, and why you think that this would not have affected your results.

L177ff: Please acknowledge that lacking data availability prevented you from identifying differences between temperate and boreal ecosystems (rather than not being there at all).

L205ff: This discussion fails to acknowledge that N deposition data was lacking for an important fraction of the data set.

Figure 2: increase font size of axis labels

Figure 3: Improve resolution of figure. Use entire column width to maximise readability.

Best wishes,
Sönke

revised manuscript p13 l 271: It's -> Its