Review of “Understanding the balance between methane production and oxidation from wetlands using a minimalistic emissions model” by Gordon R. McNicol, Anita T. Layton and Nandita B. Basu.

In their manuscript, McNicol and co-authors propose a zero-dimensional model of methane production, oxidation, and emission. The authors then investigate its application to a number of wetlands in the Prairie Pothole Region. They reduce the model even further and are able to relate methane emissions to water table position, finding maximum emissions with water table at or above the surface.

Overall, this is a very well-written manuscript, presenting a very interesting simple model that allows nicely illustrates the influences on wetland methane emissions. I recommend publication after minor revisions.

Of course there are a few minor points that could be improved:

1) Section 2: “we focus on soil columns at the centre of each wetlands”. Do you know how close to the edge of a wetland one could actually go before the underlying assumptions break down? I suspect it’s very close, but I have no solid arguments. If you have any arguments better than gut feeling, it would be very interesting to discuss these here. If not, you are welcome to skip this point.

2) Section 3.1: You relate WFPS linearly to water table. Strictly speaking, this is not true, as water does not necessarily fill available pore volume from the bottom upwards (nonetheless nearly everyone makes this simplification). You also make some further simplifications, like not considering the three emission pathways explicitly. Please summarize these simplifications and briefly discuss (speculate, if necessary) the effect they have on model results.

3) Section 4.1, Figure 5: Very nice fit to the different wetlands. Did you use identical parameter values for all wetlands, or different ones? Maybe the ones in Table A1? Which parameters weree adjusted, and why? A discussion of the parameter choice would be really interesting.

Further little details:

• Line 9: “Peak fluxes consistently occur at or just above the soil surface” – reads as if flux at surface is meant, but it is the water table at the surface that is important.
• Line 32: “shaped by complex” (without a)
• Line 33: “Among these” (not amongst)
• Line 41: “where microbes instead release” (not releasing)
• Line 180: “aerenchymous plants” (not arenchymous)
• Line 283: “captures the trend” (not capturing)
• Line 363: “...depends on both the…” Either the both is superfluous, or we are missing the other thing that is relevant in addition to the water table. Or you actually mean the wetland-specific parameters, but that doesn’t really become clear from the sentence. I suggest you reformulate it.

I have read the manuscript. I thought the paper was well written and followed a logical workflow. This study provides an excellent example of using extensive field data to parameterize a simplified, quasi-mechanistic modeling approach.

The paper could have provided more information on the data source, which fluxes were used? Each wetland had 5 wetland chambers and 3 upland chambers in each wetland. Were only wetland chambers used? Was there any averaging across chambers?

I also questioned some assumptions in the notes below. The authors should mention the role of methylotrophic methanogenesis, particularly in PPR wetlands (Dalcin et al. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.13633, Bechtold et al. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-56133-0).

There are also methane production in oxic water columns and anerobic conditions that support methanotrophy. These were not discussed.

Title: Minimalist emissions model is very jargony and will lose audience immediately.

1. Find a more universal definition of wetlands. Bansal et al. 2023 methods review paper has a lot of basic wetland info and citations: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13157-023-01722-2

1. There are many other types of wetlands. The PPR wetlands are often less than 0.1 ha.
2. Use a couple PPR-specific citations.
3. newer citation on wetland loss. Fluet-Chouinard et al. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05572-6

1. Or uptake GHGs
2. Not clear in sentence that methane or all three gases are the focus.

Fig. 1. Most of the abbreviations are not labeled. More labels/graphics to make this information and a conceptual figure would help.

1. Water in soils doesn’t really dilute the DOC. If fresh water was moving through the soils, then maybe.

1. There are three pathways. Methylotrophic methanogenesis may be very important in PPR wetlands

1. >30 degree days are more likely in the future. Impact?

1. Plant transport is very dependent on water table. If zw=zb, then plant transport will not be any different than diffusion in terms of methanotropy. When water table is higher, zw>zs, then plant transport allows methane to skip past methanotrophy (Bansal et al. 2020)

1. use a PPR citation

1. Variables could use more details, NDVI (from Landsat satellite imagery), soil temperature (or water temperature when zw>5 cm), water-filled pore space (top 5 cm soils). Do these detail affect model or interpretation?

1. It is possible that removing those high emissions from the dataset is causing the poor performance in P8, which is driven by high rates of ebullition.

Fig 5. Perhaps put area in hectares

1. methylotrophic pathways too.

Fig 6s. How did T9 have such high emissions (Me) but very low emissions in panel c?