dear authors,

Your manuscript has now been seen by three referees, and all of them find your work of interest. I fully agree. I also appreciate that you have made several steps to address the suggestions and comments by the reviewers. However, upon closer inspection I believe several changes are still required before this manuscript can be accepted for publication.

- Please have a very close look at your calculations. Table 2 seems to contain several inconsistencies. For instance, averaged across biochar treatments, the average N2O fluxes show strong differences between soil types, with fairly low SD-values. If this is correct, then how can you explain the relatively small SD-values for the averages for the individual biochar treatments across soil types? After all, these are averages of numbers that show enormous spread. There might a part of the calculation that I am not aware of that can explain these results, but for now it seems that something might have gone wrong here.
I have several other concerns about table 2 as well, please see the attached file for details.
At the very least these calculations need a better explanation. Possibly calculations need to be redone.

- Although the manuscript is generally easy to follow, it still contains quite a lot of grammatical errors. I made a few corrections in the attached file, but these are by no means complete. It might be an idea to involve a native speaker to check for language.

- On a minor note: I wonder if you can come up with a more informative title? "The effect of X on Y" is very common, but it doesn't tell potential readers what they want to know, and it doesn't invite them to find out either. Here's a possible suggestion (which you are of course free to ignore): "Biochar reduces yield-scaled emissions of reactive nitrogen gases from vegetable soils across China"

Altogether, the changes that are required are quite substantial. As such, I have decided that that another review round is warranted.

Good luck with your revisions & all the best,
Kees Jan van Groenigen

dear authors,

Thank you for this revised version of the manuscript. I believe that the comments by the reviewers have now mostly been addressed; the manuscript is almost ready to be accepted for publication. However, the manuscript still contains quite a few grammatical errors and awkward sentences. Please see the attached file for editorial suggestions.

Best regards,
Kees Jan van Groenigen

Dear authors,

Thank you for this revised version. The manuscript reads a lot better now, and it is almost ready to be published. I have a few very minor editorial suggestions, please see the manuscript for details. Finally, I noticed that a new meta-analysis on the effects of biochar on crop yields was published since your manuscript was submitted (Jeffery et al. 2017; Environmental Research Letters). While not strictly necessary, a quick reference to this paper would make the discussion more up-to-date.