Dear Angela A. Bahamondes Dominguez and co-authors,

Thank you for the revised manuscript and response. I'm pleased to accept this for publication subject to some minor amendments which I will review. These amendments are detailed below.

Kind regards,
Paul Halloran

Ref1 general comment: I agree with you that the work sits well within the scope of GMD, and that new insights into the dynamics of the ecosystem etc. are not required. I do not feel however that you have fully addressed the second part of this comment about the detail of the model description. I appreciate that you have addressed this by adding the model equations to the supplementary material, but I think the reviewers points about placing the variables in table 1 in context are valid, and as such it would make sense to move the model description equations into the main text. I appreciate that this is repetition of what is already published, but it will avoid confusion and make the readers life easier than slicing between the main text and appendix. If you disagree strongly, please explain the downsides of this approach.

Regarding the 1st specific point by the Rev1 'My main comment about the introduction is that is not clear from the text what is the point of the work, what does it add to the existing knowledge?'. You refer to the 2nd paragraph of the introduction as addressing this. In my view this paragraph summarises the literature nicely, and the paragraph that follows describes what the manuscript does, but what I think would really help the reader (addressing the reviewer's concern) would be a couple of sentences, perhaps at the end of the 2nd intro paragraph, summarising the issue, and stating very simply what this manuscript does to address it.

Regarding Rev1's comment about the description of variables in fig1, I like the figure, but agree with the reviewer, in that the value of a figure is it presents a standalone summary, and as such it should be able to be interpreted without hunting through the text for the definitions. I suggest adding these definitions to the figure caption if there is not an easy way to make them clear within the figure itself, or to link to changes made regarding my 1st comment?

You state that in response to Rev1's comment 'L276. The meaning of this sentence is not clear to me...' the sentence has been re-written, but unless I'm mistaken, it has not been changed at all.

Regarding your response to the comment 'L300. I am afraid I wouldn’t call this work innovative...' You are correct to say that the work is within the scope of the manuscript, but the reviewer is also correct to state this scientifically this not innovative. This is not to say that it is not useful, and should not be published, but please avoid unnecessary hyperbole.