Dear authors,

many thanks for your detailed responses. I believe that these changes will be sufficient in general. However, in my reading one of the reviewers did ask for a more synthetic explanation of the important underlying hypothesis about the carbon-nitrogen coupling in BASFOR rather than the complete discription of the model. The latter will remain unclear to non-modelers, even if it seems fully transparent for researchers used to dealing with models. I wonder whether you can attempt to summarise the key hypothesis and their implications briefly in the main text, and provide the full description as an Appendix. This is only a suggestion, but it may help to increase readibility of the paper.
Best wishes,
Sönke Zaehle

Dear authors,

my apologies for the delay in coming to a decision with respect to your revised manuscript. I had tried to contact the original reviewers, but failed to be able to get reviews in due course. Based on my own assessment, I think that you have sufficiently addressed the reviewer's concerns. I am happy to accept the manuscript subject to minor technical edits, noting that I still find that the manuscript could have been shorter while still being able to make the same message.

Best wishes,
Sönke Zaehle

Technical corrections:
please introduce the concept of meta-modelling early on, since this is not a standard approach. I realise that this is explained in the Methods, but I think a brief explanation in the Introduction would help the readers to understand the novelty of this appoach better.