Dr. Cheng-Wei Fan,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript “Plant n-alkane production from litterfall altered the diversity and community structure of alkane degrading bacteria in litter layer in lowland subtropical rainforest in Taiwan” to Biogeosciences. Two expert reviewers have assessed your submission and agree that it is of interest to the readers of Biogeosciences. However, the reviewers have identified numerous places that require improvement, including the need for the language to be revised by a native English speaker. Note, that the response letters would also benefit from revision by a native speaker as many of the proposed revised sentences are still riddled with grammatical and spelling errors.

Based on the reviewers’ comments and your responses I have made the decision to reconsider after major revisions. This will include sending the paper back out for review, likely to include the previous reviewers. Please revise your paper based on the reviewers’ comments. When resubmitting, please include a version of your paper showing all changes marked as track changes.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Sincerely,
Dr. Denise M. Akob

Dr. Cheng-Wei Fan,

Thank you for revising and resubmitting your manuscript "Plant n-alkane production from litterfall altered the diversity and community structure of alkane degrading bacteria in litter layer in lowland subtropical rainforest in Taiwan" to Biogeosciences. Two expert reviewers who assessed your submission previously reviewed your paper again and agree that it is much improved and of interest to the readers of Biogeosciences.

Reviewer #1 brought up some additional comments on the paper and after reading the revised paper myself I found that the introduction did provide enough background on why the litter layer is important for study. However, please consider reviewer #1's comment and consider adding more information about litter fall. Carefully consider all of reviewer #1's comments and respond to each.

Additional comments:
" Reviewer #1 is also correct that the program is MEGA (pg. 6, l. 27-28).
" Pg. 6, l. 5 and elsewhere: Metagenomics is not the best choice of terminology in this case. Although, metagenomics in its strictest definition includes amplicon sequencing the prevailing use of the term in microbiology is in reference to genomic sequencing of multiple organisms in a single community. Change this throughout the paper to something like community amplicon sequencing.
" Pg. 9, l. 19: change to bacterial community composition
" Pg. 12, L. 3 (and elsewhere): NGS is a tool but not a technique. Change to microbial community characterization.
" I agree with reviewer #1 that Figure 2 could be moved to the supplement
" Figure 4: correct the legend to remove "_" and for correct use of italics (Novel and Candidate Division are not taxonomic names)
" Figure 5: can you make the legend in the figure bigger so that you can see what the pattern is?

Based on the reviewers' comments and my editorial review I have made the decision to accept after minor revisions. Please revise your paper based on reviewer #1 and my comments. When resubmitting, please include a version of your paper showing all changes marked as track changes.

Best,
Dr. Denise M. Akob

Dear Dr. Fan,

I am pleased to inform you that your paper has been accepted. Thank you for revising the paper based on the reviewers comments.

Best,
Dr. Denise M. Akob