Dear Authors,

I went through your new version of manuscript and appreciate the modifications you made in order to clarify presentation of your ideas, moderate some statements and delimit limits of your study. However, I would ask you to make an effort to synthetize your discussions by shortening the sections that are viewed as speculative by the two referees. This important effort will avoid a dilution of the main results of your study in speculative discussions using the conditional form.

Regards,

Sébastien Fontaine

Dear authors,

I checked your modifications and I am satisfied by your efforts of synthesis. I have some additional recommandations:

- Your manuscript includes too many items (figures and tables). Please select six items that will be presented in the main text and prepare supplementary files for the other items.

- Your discussion has too many subtitles. Could you simplify the structuration by, for example, including some titles in the paragraph? To make it visible you can format it in bold or italic.

Thank you for having submitted to Biogeoscience this nice piece of work.

Sébastien