Dear Dr. Vos,

We have now received reviews for your paper. All reviewers found your paper interesting. But, they have also raised important concerns that you should address before this paper can be accepted for publication in SOIL.

When submitting a revised manuscript please ensure that you address the following points:
- SC1 and RC1 raise an important point about the Jaconi et al not being available at this point. The authors should update on the status of the paper.
- Response to RC1: Page 2, the reviewer raises important point about not calling a pool of OM extracted after ultrasonication as fPOM. I appreciate the author's response and additional info that they are providing in the revised manuscript. But, it is still important not to refer to the OM extracted using ultrasonication as fPOM. Please revise the text.
- I agree with RC3 that putting both fPOM and oPOM pools together is problematic. These two pools (even though they can be very small fraction of soil C) differ in their availability for decomposition, and hence persistence in soil. Even if it is difficult to predict oPOM alone, and if the authors have a hard time achieving good results when they treat the two pools (as stated in C4) it is important to make sure that adding these two pools is not leading to confounding and potentially misleading results.

Best wishes,
Asmeret Asefaw Berhe
Associate Editor, SOIL
Assocaite Professor, Soil Biogeochemistry, UC Merced

Dear Dr. Vos,
I am glad to inform you that we are now ready to accept your manuscript for publicaiton in SOIL.
I have attached a file with a few, mostly editorial, comments and suggestions. Once you return your revised manuscript that addresses these comments your paper will be officially accepted.
Thank you for patiently addressing all the reviewer comments.
Cheers,
Asmeret

Dear authors,

I have now read the revised ms and the report of the topical editor in detail. I am happy to inform you that we can accept your ms for publication. However, note that we expect you to carefully consider the technical corrections suggested by the TE before submitting your final version.

Thank you for considering SOIL!

Kristof Van Oost