Dear authors:

Thank you for making open discussion and for providing replies to referee comments. Your manuscript received two referee reports, and the referees provided positive evaluations. They thought that your manuscript has good scientific quality and presentation quality. I studied through the open discussion and found that the referees gave sound recommendations and that you responded appropriately to their comments. Especially, I appreciate your including new supplementary figures for all-site results, which indicates some inter-site differences, and Taylor diagrams for model evaluation. In terms of the model, improvement by introducing ED2 seems an effective option. Although the model is a vegetation demography model, it may also include some advanced hydrological schemes. Finally, I recommend the authors to make major revision for the manuscript, based on the open discussion.

Dear authors:

Thank you for providing the revised manuscript accompanied with your explanation how it was updated. I confirmed that you responded adequately to the referee comments, especially on the inclusion of results from all four sites into main text (with a table and geographical map of the sites). By reinforcing descriptions of the model (e.g. phenology) and experimental setup, the manuscript became much clearer than the previous one. I have not received additional comments on the manuscript after your replies, and the I conclude that it would be acceptable for publication.

Technical points
Line 130: Several references in Table 1 are missing in References.
Line 700: The reference record of IPCC (2014) looks incomplete. Indeed, I could not find it on the IPCC web page.