Dear Liudmila,

Your manuscript received two review reports and a short comment, which highlighted the relevance of your study but also raised a number of concerns that need to be addressed before a decision on publication can be made. All reports provided clear and constructive suggestions for improvement, and I would recommend you to prepare an adequately revised version of your manuscript along with a point-by-point reply on how the comments and suggestions were accommodated in your revision.

Best regards
Steven Bouillon

Dear Liudmila,

Your manuscript received detailed suggestions for improvement and more critical discussion from 2 reviewers as well as constructive feedback via a public short comment; based on their evaluations and your initial author replies I feel it should be possible to adequately address their concerns. Both reviewers indicated their willingness to re-evaluate a revised version.
With best regards
Steven Bouillon

Dear dr Shirokova and co-authors
Both original reviewers have evaluated your revised manuscript. While one (Referee #1) finds that his/her comments and suggestions have been well addressed in the new version of your manuscript, Referee #2 is more critical on the extent to which the revisions offer a substantial improvement and recomments that more extensive revisions are required.
In particular, the issue of seasonality should be discussed in more detail, this is indeed an important shortcoming but one for which - based on your author replies- I expect that a more rigorous discussion could be provided. It appears that similar data have also been collected during early summer/spring, and autumn, but that these were not included or referred to in the revised version due to being ‘out of scope’.
Since other suggestions for improvement were either addressed, or cannot be addressed with the data at hand, I would like to encourage you to revisit this point and consider including these important data at least partially if they can help in resolving the question on how important the seasonal bias might be. This would be a major improvement over the current version where the reader can only be alerted to a possible bias due to the sampling period. If there are valid reasons not to include or refer to data collected during other seasons, please clarify this.

With best regards
Steven Bouillon

Dear Liudmila,

Thank you for your revisions and detailed author replies. I feel you have addressed the issues raised to the extent possible with the available data; the revised version is therefore accepted for final publication in BG.

Best regards
Steven Bouillon