Dear Authors,

I have now read through your manuscript, your three reviews and your responses and I have decided that major revisions are required. I felt that all of the reviews were positive and I think this paper will be of a lot of interest to the community.

If I could make one suggestion, which likely reflects my personal world bias. I felt like more could be done to provide a mechanistic interpretation of the double peak. For example, why would photosynthetic capacity drop and then peak again? One interpretation is differences in PAR, although I see little evidence from your Fig 6? Another is more physiological, is it a response to increasing moisture stress? You could conceivably show this by examining timeseries of air temperature, VPD (if you have it from nearby) and perhaps a climatic water deficit (e.g. PPT-PET)? Or at least, show something about precipitation that might correspond with this double peak. Currently, you show an accumulated PPT, which I don't think shows a mechanistic explanation.

Regarding the NIRv x PAR point raised by Professor Guanter, I think that even if the authors are not going to show such a plot (for the reasons outlined), it would be very worthwhile adding some discussion text on this point.

Best wishes with your revisions,

Martin De Kauwe

Dear Authors,

Your revised manuscript has now been seen by two reviewers and both are satisfied with your revisions. One reviewer did request that you include some short information on data filtering and interpolation (as given in the responses to reviewers) in the main text for reproducibility reasons. This seems like a good addition to me, would this be possible? In addition,

-The caption of Fig.4: you have ‘but’ twice
-p.17 l.34: two transects, not three

Following these revisions, I am happy to recommend your manuscript is accepted.

Best wishes,

Martin

Dear Authors,

I am now recommending your manuscript for publication, many congratulations.

Happy New Year,

Martin