Dear authors,

Thank you for your response to many of the reviewer comments. Unfortunately, by only quoting a few words from the original reviewer comments in your response, it is hard to verify where each of the comments is addressed, and in fact many of the answers are rather vague, e.g. that a paragraph will be re-written, without specifying how. Given the substantial re-writes requested and promised, I am likely to send the revised manuscript out for a second round of reviews. To facilitate and accelerate the review process, please provide point-by-point responses to all reviewer comments with references to the modified text in the revised manuscript.

Both reviewers point out that the description of the methods and data given in the text is not sufficient to ensure reproducibility of the results. This needs to be fixed. Before publication in HESSD, I requested a data availability statement following the HESS data policy guidelines (http://www.hydrology-and-earth-system-sciences.net/about/data_policy.html). Thank you for including a link to the data you collected and to the models you used. Unfortunately, one of the links provided (http://www.river2d.ualberta.ca/download.htm) is broken and neither of the links point to long-term data repositories. The problem here is that the data available under those links today may not be the same as that available in a few years time, as illustrated by the broken link already. Furthermore, the raw data provided under your institutional web address is not self-explanatory and does not permit reproduction of the figures presented in the paper without additional information. I would like to strongly encourage you to deposit all data and software in a reliable public data repository, along with adequate instructions how to reproduce and understand all the results presented in the paper. If you struggle to find an adequate repository on re3data.org, I can recommend zenodo.org, which I have used myself in the past.

In addition, I would like to urge you to take any adequate measure in the paper and/or supplementary material to make it easier for the reader to understand how the results were obtained. A figure summarising the methodology could indeed be helpful, but as I said before, the details ensuring reproducibility must also be available to the readers. In this context, I would also like you to put some more thoughts into the uncertainties related to the model predictions. Referee #1 was surprised about unusual choices of parameter values (e.g. shear stress), while Referee #2 asked how the modelling uncertainties of the two models were related to each other and how they would propagate from one to the other. These are very valid questions and need to be discussed.

Another major point raised by both reviewers is the assumption of invariant topography. I your response, you claim that a fixed topography enables isolation of the effect of riparian landscape degradation. I was not able to follow this line of argument, as it is unclear to me why you consider topography and "landscape" to be independent. What do you mean by landscape? Please explain the concepts more clearly and also include the discussion points raised by the referees in the paper, as they are likely questions that other readers will ask themselves while reading your article.

Regarding the structure of the document, I agree with both referees that there is need for improvement and I would propose to more clearly formulate research questions and/or falsifiable hypotheses in the introduction and focus the results section in a way to answer the questions and/or test the hypotheses, with clear take-away messages related to each figure/table. As pointed out by Referee #2, the current formulation of the research questions sounds more like rhetorical post-hoc questions formulated after analysing the results.

Although addressing all the comments may require substantial additional work, I hope that you will use this opportunity to get the manuscript into a state that will have a lasting impact on the scientific community.

Dear authors,
Both reviewers now recommend publication, though one asked for a couple of technical corrections. Could you please correct these before proceeding? Thank you.

Best regards,
Stan