Dear Authors,

Thank you for carefully responding to the reviewers' comments in the online discussion. At this stage, I would like to invite you to submit a revised version of your manuscript (please highlight the changes to ease my evaluation of the changes you made).

Kind regards,
Dr. Ny Riavo G. Voarintsoa

Dear authors,

Your revised manuscript has been sent out to the original two reviewers, whose feedback was invaluable in the improvement of your manuscript. One of the reviewers provided the following comment: “The authors’ replies to my previous comments are mostly adequate. However, a caveat on the resin method should be added into the text: although comparative differences may be used to indicate the relative abundance of organic matter captured by the same method and procedure, overloading (if present) may obscure actual (presumably larger) variations between samples. Hence, the authors should at least provide considerations or rationale to rule out this possibility.” Can you please address this?

As an Editor, I also found several suggestions for improvements:

Section 2.1.: Please include specific lat/long for each cave.
Table 1: the dft in the table is quite confusing. Please indicate with a dot (or a relevant shape) in your supplementary figure, where exactly the trenches were drilled.

Also, in the supplementary, remove the text “ S3 Photographs of the flowstone samples”, it is confusing as it represents neither a caption nor a sentence.

Figure 4: Please use a real arrow rather than < and > to indicate the end-members.

On p.10 of your revised manuscript, please rephrase the newly added text: The S/V and C/V ratios of all sample types normalized to the respective ratios of Hodges Creek Cave (HC) are presented in Figures 6a and 6b, respectively.


Finally, I'd like the authors also to carefully consider and revise the content of the supplementary materials. There are a lot of missing information, marked with "?". In fact, some of these information can be easily found in the manuscript, and putting them in the supplementary is redundant.

The authors made a statement about the data availability that "All relevant data is included in the manuscript and the supplement." However, only the U-Th data and the vegetation/soil above the cave are presented. Please include also the table data used to make Figures 3–7. These are the core of the manuscript, however, these data are missing. Please fix these.



Thank you for addressing these comments/suggestions. Looking forward to your revision,

Best wishes,
Dr. Ny Riavo G. Voarintsoa

Dear authors,

Thank you for persevering the peer review process, and for addressing the requests/comments/suggestions.
The title in the supplementary looks fine now.
I am happy to accept your contribution to be published in EGU Biogeosciences.

Congratulations and best wishes,
Dr. Ny Riavo G. Voarintsoa