Dear authors,

I have now assessed the reviewer comments and your responses in the interactive discussion. I generally agree with your approach for the revisions but have two suggestions I would like you to consider:

Regarding the short time for the soil to adjust after lysimeters were installed, I would like you to include a brief note about the suitability for nutrient leaching but not for some other soil processes. This to make readers aware and cautious about it when they would conduct similar experiments.

In the Discussion, you mention that fertilization should be avoided during periods of high drainage fluxes. Based on the referee comments, you suggest to modify this to indicate that fertilization during the period of high drainage fluxes should be reduced. Could it be an option to (also) spread the fertilization a bit more in time during that period?

I also like to repeat the request by referee 1 to carefully check spelling and grammar.


I look forward to receiving the revised manuscript and given that the three referees were positive about your work and suggested only relatively minor changes, I anticipate that the revised manuscript will only need to be reviewed by me.

Kind regards,
Sara

Dear authors,
I am pleased to accept your revised manuscript for publication in Biogeosciences. I indicated that the manuscript is accepted but subject to technical corrections because I still see possibilities for textual improvements. Below I list several suggestions for this (line numbers refer to the revised manuscript with tracked changes).
Although I think the writing is acceptable, further language checking (maybe by a native English speaker) could still improve the readability of your manuscript.
Kind regards,
Sara

l. 30: remove ‘the efficiency of’
l.33: ‘suggest’ instead of ‘suggested’
l.69: remove ‘possibly’
l.87: remove ‘possibly’
l.102: rephrase ‘far from reach of crop roots’. Do you mean ‘which are out of reach for crop roots’?
l.131: Rephrase ‘The palm circle despite having direct fertilization have also large water and nutrient uptake, such that…’, for example to ‘The palm circle receives the fertilizer directly, but also takes up high/higher amounts of water and nutrients. Hence, large leaching losses….’
l.149ff: replace ‘these hypotheses’ with ‘the following hypotheses’ and replace ‘will be’ with ‘are’ in the hypotheses
l.316: remove ‘plots’ after ‘treatments’
l. 395-396: rephrase ‘were exhibited clearly’. Do you mean ‘were significant’?
l.423: add ‘a’ after ‘showed’
l.425: replace ‘had opposite patterns as’ by ‘showed opposite patterns than’
l.480: replace ‘making our …. limited’ by ‘limiting comparison with literature values’
l.482: should ‘estimated with the same Penman–Monteith method’ be replaced by ‘using only the Penman–Monteith method’?
l.494: add ‘a’ before ‘lower’
l.495: replace ‘plantation’ by ‘plantations’
l.517: replace ‘had’ by ‘likely’
l.596: replace’ and its low base saturation’ by ‘and base saturation was low’
l.597: replace ‘will largely underestimate’ by ‘can substantially underestimate’
l.669: replace ’long-term measurement’ by ‘long-term monitoring’
l.693: replace ‘for N’ by ‘with N’
l.720: ‘Last’ instead of ‘Lastly’
l.721: Do you mean ‘estimated is another oil palm plantation study that used a model that was validated with field measurements’? -> please be clear in the writing here