Dear authors,
I have gone over your responses to the reviewers' comments and now invite you to prepare and submit a revised version of your manuscript. Please provide a version were modifications are visible i.e. track change mode, and another one in which they are accepted. They will be sent for additional review to the original referees. In preparing the revised manuscript, you should pay particular attention to the issues raised by both reviewers, in particular moderate the transfer of lab observations under experimental conditions to processes occurring in the field, and well justify the absence of control with no microbes (or if impossible explain why).
Thanks you for submitting your work to Biogeosciences,
Best regards,
Sophie Bonnet

Dear Dr Valdez,

I thank you for your detailed revisions to the reviewers' comments and am very pleased to recommend your paper for publication in Biogeosciences after some technical corrections.

In figure 1, please change the colour of letter “A” referring to station A, to make it visible. Uniformize the font size of the figure, i.e. either (a) increase the font size of all stations and of the description of symbols to be the same as the font size of x-y axis, or (b) decrease the font size of x-y axis and increase the size of the figure.

Please use the same font type in all figures.

In Table 1 please check again and correct the use of either 2 or 3 decimals in the whole table.

Sincerely,

Sophie Bonnet