Dear authors,
thanks again for sending your very interesting manuscript to SOIL. I fully agree with all reviewers that this is a very nice overview over historic and still running long-term experiments in Germany.
You adequately addressed most of the comments by the reviewers. Personally, I think you should rethink the statistics comments of Rev #3 and I would also appreciate if you could give some more details regarding data availability (Rev #1) and also an indication of the availability of archived samples (Rev #2) would be nice to have.
Based on the reviewer’s comments and your interactive response, I would ask you to rework your manuscript considering the comments of all three reviewers.
I am looking forward to your revised manuscript.
Yours sincerely
Peter Fiener

Dear Authors,

you well addressed the important topics raised by the three reviewers and responded in detail to each comment. Overall, I enjoyed reading the paper again. Reviewer #3 re-reviewed the paper as the reviewer was most critical regarding the used statistics. As you could see from the recommendation of Rev#3 the re-review is quite positive.

Overall, I am accepting the paper with some technical corrections (see below) and looking forward to your final submission.

Best regards,
Peter Fiener

Technical corrections (Note I am referring to the line numbers in the manuscript with tracked-changes):

Line 54: Using the term "Bodendauerbeobachtungsfläche" without explaining what you mean is difficult to understand for an international readership.

Chapter 3.2.1, e.g. line 320: When describing the locations of the different LTFEs within Germany you partly use terms which might be difficult for international readers, e.g. Loess Boerde. I suggest you go through this chapter again and critically review the use of German names for this regions.

Line 383: Be more explicit what you mean by "C-Model".

References:
- Please go through your references there a several small errors, e.g. line 437-438: do not use capitals in the title; Science is not in capitals
- Please check if Piepho & Thanh is already published (accepted is not citable).

Fig. 3: You are using small circle signatures to indicate the cumulative number of LTFEs. This is masking the information of the different types of LTFEs. So, I suggest using a line instead of the circle signatures.

Dear Dr Grosse and colleagues

Many thanks for submitting your paper to SOIL. You will see that that Topical Editor has recommended publishing your paper subject to some small technical corrections and I am happy to support his view.

I look forward to seeing your paper published in SOIL

John Quinton
Executive Editor.