Dear Authors,

I have read both the reviewer reports and your manuscript carefully, and recommend that some minor revisions be undertaken according to the reviewers’ comments. Thank you for your thoughtful responses to those comments, which I feel capture well the revisions that need to be done (especially the response to Reviewer #2). With regard to the reviewer suggestions of putting this work in context of previous work on soil drying-rewetting and CO2 efflux from soils, I recommend including this to the extent possible given the format of the short communication.

Best wishes,
Jocelyn Lavallee

Dear Authors,

Thank you for your thorough edits to the manuscript, which have markedly improved it and have adequately addressed the reviewer comments. I am recommending some additional minor edits (below) to improve clarity, but in general am satisfied with the changes thus far and believe it will be entirely satisfactory after these additional changes are made.

Best wishes,
Jocelyn Lavallee

Line 39: perhaps add “and different timepoints within the same soil” or similar, but you may choose to ignore this comment.

Line 51: I believe this is still slightly confusing, since annual precipitation includes snowfall and so the reader may still expect it to be a larger number than the annual snowfall. It's not clear whether the snowfall number presented is snow depth or meltwater. Perhaps simply report total annual precipitation, which need not be divided into rainfall and snowfall for the purposes of this manuscript.

Lines 52-53: change “for the prior 40 years" to “ for the 40 years prior to sampling”

Line 63: change “previously assessed (Robertson, 2016)” to “as previously assessed by Robertson (2016)”

Line 98: Consider changing "using bootstrapping to allow for error estimates” to “using bootstrapping to estimate error”

Line 101: “zeroes” should be “zeros”

Line 143-144: This feels too strong. Perhaps “thus calling into question its reliability as a soil health indicator”?

Line 145: add “subsequent” before "short-term CO2 pulses”

Lines 145-146: I believe that “thereby diminishing the assay’s value as an indicator of soil health” is a bit too strong and is also repetitive with the first sentence in the paragraph. I recommend deleting, and this paragraph could be combined with the following one.

Line 148: Consider changing to “Without knowledge of these pre-assay CO2 losses...”

Line 152: change “daily” to 24-h

Lines 155-160: If brevity is possible here, it would be helpful to the reader if you could clarify these mechanisms in the context of the experimental stages, i.e. would these potential mechanisms occur in or affect results of the dry-down phase or the rewetting and 24-h pulse?

Line 171: change to “fixed, available C pool”

Line 171-172: Please add a bit of detail as to why soil-specific correction factors are needed, e.g. differences in soil texture or microbial communities.

Line 183: change to “methods and/or a correction factor”

We are pleased to accept your manuscript for publication in SOIL. Thankyou for working constructively with the topic editor to revise the manuscript and for considering SOIL as an outlet for your research.
Best wishes
Jeanette Whitaker
Executive Editor