Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting your work to Biogeosciences. As you’ve seen, your work has been evaluated by three reviewers, all of whom pointed out major presentational and, to some degree, interpretation concerns. The manuscript therefore needs major revisions.

All reviewers were unanimous in pointing out the need for a better explanation of your methods. As Reviewer 1 points out, understanding the methods is also necessary for the reader to know how to interpret the accompanying figures. The statement in one of your replies that “It is actually not needed to understand each method down to their details” is therefore somewhat concerning – understanding the mathematical foundations of the method is necessary to interpret the figures in this paper, which are not easy to interpret if you are not already familiar with the methods.

I also suggest that the authors may want to clarify the goals, motivation, and approach of this study in more detail in the introduction. For example, lines 21-22 seem to suggest that the paper is at least partially trying to understand the controls on productivity, but you write in response to reviewer 1’s comment that this is not the case. The idea that networks are to be classified – a fundamental part of your interpretation of the study – comes as a surprise in the middle of the methods in line 97.

Lastly, both Reviewers 2 an 3 seemed to think your writing suggests that biosphere-atmosphere interactions are primarily controlled by atmospheric conditions with little role for biospheric-effects. My understanding is that this is not what you are saying – that indeed the atmospheric conditions only determine the regime type of interactions a given ecosystem is in at a given time (the functional convergence) and not necessarily the overall magnitude or behavior of the interactions across time. Nevertheless, if a majority of your reviewers are confused about this, most readers likely will be, too. Please make sure to clarify this in your writing. A revised introduction should help.

Best regards,
Alex Konings

Dear authors,

Thank you for comprehensively addressing the previous reviews. As you can see, two of the reviewers now believe your paper is much improved, and I agree. Please address the remaining comments, but I am happy to recommend the paper be accepted subject to technical corrections. Congratulations.

Best regards,
Alex