Dear authors,
many thanks for your comments and responses to the reviewer comments. Please revise the manuscript along the responses you outlined, providing a point-by-point reply as to how you've changed the manuscript. Please give particular attention to ensuring that the comments of reviewer #2 and your responses to these comments are adequately reflected in the manuscript (probably mostly in the discussion). I very much appreciate that you are willing to make the code available, but I think that next to sharing the code, I agree with reviewer #2 that this is a very good example of an approach to link manipulation and modelling, and that this approach itself deserves highlighting (note that I do not think that the manuscript needs a change in focus).
Best wishes,
Sönke

Dear authors,

many thanks for your revised manuscript, which does satisfactorily address all concerns raised by the reviewers. Based on my own reading of the revised manuscript, I have a small range of minor, editorial suggestions to help improve the clarity of the manuscript.

Looking forward to receiving a final version of the manuscript in short time,
Sönke

Minor editorial comments:

L 56: is the “and” necessary here? In my view the implementation in models is solely discussed because of the multiple roles NCSs are assumed to play in plants.

L110-113. I would avoid mixing hypotheses and the justification of your approach here. Maybe having these added sentences after the added sentence in L107, and then continuing “Therefore, we tested … “ would be clearer?

L209: Am I to deduce from this that you assume that the tissue-specific dark respiration rate of leaves rate of used to estimate maintenance respiration rates also for woody and root tissues? What’s the justification for this simplification?

eq 7: Does not use a_r. This makes it inconsistent with the text in 223-227 and the figure 1. Why not use a_r in the equation, but add to caption and L223-227 that a_r is defined as 1-af-aw. This would avoid introducing an inline equation (which should be avoided) in line 247

L231 (eq 8-10): Probably hair-splitting, but actually these equations should read
Ct,f = k_n,f * C_n + C_s,f, etc
for consistency with eq 4-7 and you probably should repeat the partitioning now mentioned in L178.

L443: I think that the use of the term “one at a time” is misleading here, because this term strictly means keeping all other parameters at their standard values (corresponding to your individual scheme). From reading this text, I would assume that Figure 5 shows exactly what happens if each parameter is change once to “free” while all the others are kept at 5L, which is not what you’ve done nor what figure 5 shows.

L444-5: I wonder if this would be clearer if you stated explicitly that you change from the parameter set derived from DA on the 5L observations to that of the parameters obtained when using the free seedlings as constraint of the model? Please design and label table 4 such that it is not necessary to refer to “columns” of the Table in the text.

L453: This sentence reads repetitive from the preceding ones. Please make sure that the newly added text is better integrated

L448 remove (+/-)

L448: rather remove “both”, and add “, respectively” in the end?

L563: add “in seedlings”.


Figure 3 caption. remind the reader that ar is implied from af and aw, for instance by putting this explicit in the Yaxis label. Simply to avoid the reader assuming you have 6 free parameters-

Table 1: Be more explicit to state “leaf area feedback on photosynthesis and Rm”?

Table 1: Simset C better “5L and free seedlings treatment considered”

Table 1: I am not sure that “parameters changes one at a time” describes what you do here when you change an increasing number of parameters from the DA result of 5L to free

Figure 4 caption: Add “Simulated” (or similar) to the beginning of the first sentence. Assuming this is what is shown. Remove duplicate bracket in “Container size (L))”

Figure 5 caption: I am unsure about the term “input” parameters, as these plots describe the prescribed change in model parameters, but they are not really the “input”, which are temperature and ?

Figure 5 caption: Please reminder the reader that you are sequentially changing the parameter values from 5L to free.

Figure 5 caption: I think this figure would be much easier to follow if panels A-F used always the same colours for 5L and free. The link between the colours in A-F and G-I is not evident, certainly not for daltonians.


SI: Unclear what “optimum” parameter settings are. Do you mean the DA posterior?