Dear authors,

the three reviewers in principal agree that your manuscript is generally worthwhile. They however also point out several limitations and short-comings that need to be addressed in detail before the manuscript could be considered for publication. The most relevant comments to be addressed in the revised manuscript are the currently poor documentation of calculation methods, making it difficult to understand how for example nutrient budgets were estimated. The reviewers also raised the concern that the interpretations of nutrient cycling may not warranted by the available data and need at least to be qualified.
I am looking forward to receiving a revised version of the manuscript, addressing all reviewer comments in detail.

best regards,
Markus Hrachowitz

Dear authors,

the reviews of the revised version of your manuscript have now been received and the reviewers are in general satisfied with your replies to their comments and the way the comments were addressed in the revised manuscript. I do largely agree with the reviewers that the revised manuscript is significantly improved, in particular with respect to the documentation of the flux calculations and the discussion of the results.
I therefore think that the manuscript can be published once the technical corrections given below are made:

(1) The size of fonts (for number and legends) in Figures 2 and 3 are too small to recognize them. Please re-size them.
(2) There are no units for numbers in the caption of Figure 4 (should be kg N ha-1 yr-1). Please add.
(3) line 220: please define LSD
(4) line 255: please check if 2.5 kg ha-1 yr-1 is correct. should this not be rather 25 kg ha-1 yr-1?
(5) line 271: please tone down and avoid the use of absolute terms such as "perfectly". this may here be correct in terms of the ranks, but may be misleading in terms of actual correlation.

best regards,

Markus Hrachowitz