Dear Dr. Fortin,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript “Investigating Sporosarcina ureae for Application in the Strength Improvement of Sandy Soils by Ureolytic CaCO3 Solidification” to Biogeosciences. Three expert reviewers have assessed your submission and agree that it is of interest to the readers of Biogeosciences. 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 the reviewers and my comments (below). When resubmitting, please include a version of your paper showing all changes marked as track changes.

Best,
Dr. Denise M. Akob

Editor’s comments:

1. L. 21: can you define “U” as units here?
2. L. 139: use subscript for OD600
3. L. 178: provide the strain designation after the species name
4. L. 195: Sporosarcina is spelled wrong.
5. Figure 1: modify the legend to “mould”
6. When referring to figures please give the panel letter in the text (e.g., l. 276, l. 279 and elsewhere)
7. L. 274: the inclusion of parenthetical information here is a bit awkward. Consider revising.
8. L. 228-231: did you have any other SEM prep steps? Did you dehydrate the samples or mount them onto anything?
9. L. 339: since you are working with liquid cultures colony is not correct. Modify
10. Figure 2: it is difficult to tell the circles from the squares because of the error bars, consider modifying with color or gray scale. It would be more logical to put UB-1 medium on the left and UB-2 on the right. Also, define YE in the legend and specify that it’s a N source.
11. L. 368-369: revise to “media (i.e., CM-1) significantly (p < 0.05) improved in shear strength compared to control vessels (15.77 kPa) with MICP media only”
12. L. 509-576: please break this up into more than 1 paragraph
13. L. 613: not significantly
14. L. 632 and elsewhere: it seems that this should be abundance and not “colony total”
15. L. 646: do you mean retain?
16. L. 652: do you mean “reflective of”?

Dear Dr. Fortin,

Thank you for revising your paper. I have accepted it subject to the technical corrections listed below. Thank you for submitting your paper to Biogeosciences.

Best,
Denise

L. 288: Sporosarcina is still spelled wrong.
L. 313-314: correct ddH2O to have subscripts and be characters not numerals for "O"
L. 426: this is still not correct. You are not measuring number of colonies but the OD600. It should be "examination of bacterial abundance in culture" or bacterial biomass or growth. It was changed correctly at L. 462.