I thank both the reviewers and the authors for thorough comments and responses, and invite the authors to produce a revised version of their manuscript based on what they propose as modifications. Since there may be some "structural" changes in the discussion sections, a "track-changes" version of the revision would be useful to identify actions taken.

Regarding the Response from the authors I have the following remark:
Ad "Response to the interactive comment by the anonymous referee # 2":
In the response to the second part of Comment 2) the authors do not indicate if and how they would adapt the manuscript based on these comments.

Dear authors,

I have read the revised manuscript and made comparisons to the response letter.

Some of the implemented changes are not in line with the changes announced in the response letter and I ask the authors to check if this was intentional or in error. More specifically:
1. The actual change in line 65 is not the same as the proposed change, more specifically, the words "and more closed N cycle" were omitted. This appears to weaken the reference to the other tropical sites as only N availability is considered. Please make sure this omission was intentional.
2. The changes in lines 98+99 do, in contrast to the announced changes, not mention that the hypothesis also includes that delta15N in the topsoil is more enriched than in the subsoil. So is it (or not) part of the hypothesis?
3. Line 164: if RSTD=0 as suggested in the text, the result of eq.1 is infinity. The delta notation corrects found 15N/14N ratios (RSMP) for atmospheric (reference) ratios (RSTD).
A specific comment:
4. The SEM arrives a bit out of the blue and is only of value for those rare readers who know what SEM can be used for. One could refer, as some motivation for to its usage, to cases that include process information in soil mapping (e.g. Angelini et al., 2017, https://doi.org/10.1111/ejss.12446).

After these checks, which I do not need to review again, I ask the authors to submit their manuscript without the track-changes and then it can be accepted for publication.

Thanks for your submission.
Peter Finke
TE Soil

Dear authors, I am glad to inform that your manuscript will be accepted for publication in SOIL after some final technical corrections suggested by the Topical Editor.

Sincerely

Jorge