Dear authors,

I have now assessed the manuscript, all reviewer comments and your responses. After careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that your manuscript requires major revision following the reviewers' comments and suggestions. In addition, I received the assessment of a third reviewer after the submission deadline, which I included as supplmentary pdf. Please also address these comments.

Finally, I also had a few additional comments when I read your paper, which are as follows:

L. 167: Please provide the information on the sampling dates of the three different soils.

L. 183: How can the SIR have been determined in summer 2010 and the experiments started in June 2011, if the soil was stored for a maximal duration of 2 months?

L. 253: Add "hours" after "two, four and eight".

L. 371: "...when replicates were n < 3.": Please indicate when that was the case.

Figure 1/Table 2/Table 3: It appears unlikely that CO2 emissions were of the same order of magnitude (µg C kg-1 h-1) as N2O emissions. I assume it was mg C kg-1 h-1. Please check.

L. 643-646: One important factor for the decrease in CO2 emission rates could have been substrate (glucose) depletion. Please add this point, if you agree.

L. 791: It would make more sense to start the sentence with: "The content of " instead of "Information on".

Kind regards,
Nicolas Brüggemann

Dear authors,
after having received the responses of two of the three original reviewers, and after careful checking the changes you made to the manuscript in response to the reviewers' and my comments, I agree with the reviewers that the paper has clearly improved and is almost ready for publication. However, the reviewers have still found a number of minor points that would need to be addressed before final acceptance.
Best regards,
Nicolas Brüggemann

The authors have improved the manuscript substantially and addressed all reviewer comments. There are now just some technical corrections required before the paper can be finally accepted for publication.