Dear Dr. Melton,

I have now completed my reading of your revised manuscript in the light
of the reviewers comments. Both referees recommend acceptance after
minor revisions. I see that you have taken their comments and
suggestions into account and that you have made a largely adequate
revision of the text. Thank you. Since none of the two reviewers asked
to review the revised mansucript again, I am not sending it out for
another round of reviews. I have nevertheless a few remarks and
questions, and a series of technical comments of my own, which I would
like you to consider. In the following, the line numbers refer to the
version of your manuscript from the "authors' response" file (the one
with the track changes). For the sake of simplicity, I mix the
different categories up and list them by order of appearance.


I am ready to accept your revised manuscript for *publication subject
to minor revisions (Editor review)* and I am looking forward to read
your revised manuscript.

Best regards,

Guy Munhoven


Comments:
========

My first question is more general. For me, it is not entirely clear
what the meaning of the representation of "a representation of
competition between PFTs based on a modified version of the
Lotka-Volterra (L-V) predator-prey equations" (abstract, page 4852,
lines 11-12) finally means. Is the modification the introduction of
the parameter 'b'? Or is it the use of 'b=0' that somehow seems to be
more important, as the manuscript and its conclusions currently stand.
Perhaps you could make this more clear in your text. The main problem
that I have with this affirmation is that by setting b=0 the whole
Lotka-Volterra aspect of the equations vanishes. For b=0, the resulting
system is simply linear (albeit having a special structure because of
the dominance-based ordering), but does not have anything to do with
Lotka-Volterra equations, for which the product terms are
characteristic. Is there a reason for not having produced any results
for intermediate values of b (say 0.5 or so)?

Page 4853, line 11: "influencse" should read "influence"

Page 4854, lines 15-20: Please spell out the full names of the
different models mentioned the first time they are cited (in the same
way as CTEM and the models that it is related to).

Page 4855, lines 20-22: full names for models cited the first time,
please.

Page 4855, line 21: the reference (Zhu et al. 2015) for ORCHIDEE is in
my opinion not adequate. ORCHIDEE has been in existence for more than
ten years. To my best knowledge, the complete model was first presented
in Krinner, G., N. Viovy, N. de Noblet-Ducoudré, J. Ogée, J. Polcher,
P. Friedlingstein, P. Ciais, S. Sitch, and I. C. Prentice (2005),
A dynamic global vegetation model for studies of the coupled
atmosphere-biosphere system, Global Biogeochemical Cycles, 19,
GB1015, doi:10.1029/2003GB002199.

Page 4856, lines 8-11: the added sentence is quite long and difficult
to read. Would it be possible to split it?

Page 4856, line 15: the spelled-out name of CTEM has been given before
and can be discarded here.

Page 4856, lines 15-27: The part of the text is very informative.
It is, however, not entirely clear which ones of the described
characteristics are common to CTEM 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0, and which ones are
not. Is the number of PFTs the same for all? Did v. 1.0 also have crop
PFTs ?

Page 4856, lines 25-26: Is it emphasized "In the coupled mode, ..."
Is there also a non-coupled mode? Or perhaps a standalone version of
CTEM or CTEM-CLASS, that can be used without CanESM? If so, it would be
recommended to state this, as it would strngly increase the usefulness
of CTEM.

Page 4857: "... framework of CTEM v. 1.0 ...": v. 1.0 or v. 1.1 ?

Page 4858, lines 1-2: It would be useful to have a sentence or two
on the differences here (either general, if possible, or a few
examples). As a reader, I would find the bare reference to an earlier
paper rather frustrating.

Pages 4859ff: There are many equations that follow text that ends with
a colon that does not always make sense (e.g., eqs 2, 5), or even with
a full stop, which makes the equations look somehow orphaned (e.g.,
eqs. 7, 8, 12, 14, ... and many equations in the appendix).
Often the colon can simply be discarded, and the full stops replaced
by colons. Please check. Equations that are followed by a new sentence
can also be termined by a full stop. Please check throughout!

Page 4862, line 6: I think that $g_e$ should read $g_{}e,\alpha$

Page 4864, line 4: "... period are used ..." should read
"... period is used ..." as it relates to the singular "climate"

Page 4873, line 17: the parenthesis after "Sect 4.1" is still
required and must not be discarded.

Page 4873, line 17: "disctinction" should read "distinction"

Page 4873, line 17: "evegreen" should read "evergreen"

Page 4873, line 18: "differnt" should read "different"

Page 4873, line 18: "neddle" should read "needle"

Page 4873, line 20: "... rather than a genetic ..."

Page 4873, line 24: "... found that while the use ..."

Page 4879, line 25: "CT-COMP" shoudl read "CTCOMP"

Page 4885, line 24: "distribution" should read "distributions"

Page 4885, line 27: had "to colonize in a grid cell" not better
to read ""to colonize a grid cell" ?

Page 4897, line 17: I see what is meant, but the formulation
is not really adequate. What about "to allow its logarithm to be
taken"?

Page 4902, line 8: "... the tansition form the no leaves/dormant
state ..."

Page 4903, line 1: "normal growth state to the leaf fall state ..."

Page 4907, line 7: why "4.605" ?

Page 4908, line 2: "Li et al. (2012)"

Page 4914, line 18: could you please provide a reference for the
450 gC/(kg dry org matter)?

Page 4924, line 11: the reference "Lotka (1925)" is incomplete.
If this is a book, please provide the publisher's name and city,
as well as number of pages; if it is a paper in a journal or a
collection, please provide titles (and editors) and page numbers.

Page 4924, line 16: add comma after "Jung, M."

Page 4929: The reference to Zobler (1986) is formulated in a
very strange way.

Page 4933, caption to Table A1: at the end it says
"the nitrogen/time mean PAR" This expression has been modified
in the main text. Please modify here as well.

Page 4941: please enlarge the graph as far as possible.
The maps are really small currently.

Page 4942: the maps are even smaller than in Fig. 2.
I suggest to split the figure in two (needleaf related lines
in one and broadleaf related ones in the other) and to enlarge
the graphs by as much as possible. The maps are extremely small
in the current version and they are really barely readable.

Page 4943, line 2 in the caption: "LV" should read "L-V" (twice)
to be consistent with the rest of the text

Page 4946, lines 4 and 5 of the caption: "LV" should read "L-V"
(twice) to be consistent with the rest of the text

Page 4947, lines 6-9: please check the phrasing. The word
"dataset" appears quite often. Please notice that the 'D' in
HWSD (has it been spelled out in the main text when it appeared
first?) alreafdy stand for "database". Correct "... burned area is
GFED v. 3.1. from (Giglio et al., 2006)." to read "burned area is
from GFED v. 3.1. (Giglio et al., 2006)."

Dear Joe Melton,
Dear Vivek Arora,

I have gone through your revised manuscript. Thank you for the
careful consideration of my comments and the clear and editor-friendly
authors' response (this holds for the previous one as well).

For your information: JSBACH stands for
"Jena Scheme for Biosphere-Atmosphere Coupling in Hamburg"
according to Victor Brovkin, Stephan J. Lorenz, Johann Jungclaus,
Thomas Raddatz, Claudia Timmreck, Christian H. Reick, Joachim Segschneider
and Katharina Six (2010) Sensitivity of a coupled climate-carbon cycle
model to large volcanic eruptions during the last millennium.
Tellus 62B, 674-681. DOI: 10.1111/j.1600-0889.2010.00471.x
Feel free to include that information in the typesetting files that
you will be required to upload if you wish to do so (no obligation).


I am anyway pleased to inform you that I accept your paper for publication.


Thank you once again for considering Geoscientific Model Development
for the publication of your model development.


Best regards,

Guy Munhoven