CO Editor

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The manuscript presented the implementation of different management schemes in LPJmL, and assessed the impact of the schemes on productivity and soil carbon storage. In the revised manuscript and responses, the authors addressed the reviewers’ most comments very well. I would recommend to accept it after addressing the following issues:
1) P4L5: from the detailed description in Methods, M is not an ‘intensive’ mowing.
2) P5L9: It might be better to cite original reference for the pasture area.
3) P6L26: LPJmL3.5 is not mentioned before. Either give a reference or a web link.
4) P8L14: small ruminants
5) P8L15: It still be necessary to define or mention where the combination management to be used. For example, rangeland may not be mown in most regions.
6) P8L24-26: the description here is not the same as in Sec. 1.2.
7) P9L3: Vegetated period could be much shorter than 1 year, which makes harvest may be failed in non-growing season? I am not convinced that option M is a good/typical management schemes. But it might be useful to represent in the future a combination of mowing+grazing.
8) P10L16: Is there a fixed fraction in the model for the carbon to animal and mineralized?
9) P11L14: Why use 390-year spinup?
10) P11L27: why use 1998-2002 rather than usually used long-term mean? Please specify the reason.
11) P12L9: harvest here is a little confusing. May think about change a word. biomass use potential?
12) P13L23: Here savanna is used. Does it fit the classification of Koppen classification? As mentioned by Reviewer 1, I cannot find the rationales behind this climate classification. It is not as mentioned in the response can help explain ‘motivated by the values in the climate response figures’, because the difference response to management did not well locate in the bioclimatic regions defined here.
13) P13L27: It is a little hard to believe 72% of NPP is harvested (include belowground NPP?) given the curve in Fig. 1.
14) P15L5: If the exponentially grow is due to lr, it would be necessary to explain other factors that should affect the regrowth such as nutrient limitation.
15) P16L2: It seems not ‘below’ 500 in Fig 5.
16) P16L11: 3.5 is not slightly higher in mean.
17) P16L16: in previous similar presentation, 100 gC was used. Might be better to stick to it.
18) P19L4-5: It may be necessary to explain this ratio under the context of turnover time of soil, since mowing/grazing only affect biomass input into the soil.
19) P20L20-21: this sentence is hard to understand.
20) P25L4: ‘animals are not only fed with grass’ It is the situation for many regions of the world. Is it?
21) P25L11: And might be more importantly depending on the carbon-nutrient interactions.
22) P25L27: and may also no external fertilization.
23) P3L24: you mentioned in Sec. 4.2 that Chang et al., 2016 has applied a model at global scale.

Interactive discussion

Peer-review completion