The authors have addressed all the concerns that were raised by the reviewers. However, some changes need to be made before this manuscript can be accepted for publication. The manuscript still contains a few spelling mistakes and grammatical errors; please see the annotated pdf-file for details. I also added some minor editorial suggestions.

In Figure 12, please make sure that both panels are in logarithmic scale.

Finally, most of the figures contain a lot of text, making them overly busy. It should be possible to reduce the amount of text substantially, without losing any essential information. For instance, in Figure 4, does the "LITTER" box need all the different types of litter mentioned? Does the "Oil palm" box need to mention all the biomass components? Why include the fate of harvested fruit bunches? Why does the word ""fresh fruit bunches" appear above and inside the box? Please try and reduce the number of words by at least 30%.

In the other figures, there might not be a need to include the full reference to each model (i.e. author plus year) in all the figures. After all, in the main text, you just refer to the models by their name (e.g. WALNUCAS, not "WANULCAS (Noordwijk et al. 2004)".

Dear authors,

This manuscript can now be accepted for publication. Thank you for the careful revision of the main text; this version reads a lot better.

regards,
Kees Jan van Groenigen