The authors present a set of ten practical guidelines for measuring microclimate in ecological studies. The guidelines are structured in an intuitive way, resembling a typical workflow when designing, conducting and evaluating a microclimate-focused research project. The advice, references and examples provided are practical and extensive, in particular also the code and output in the Supplementary Material. The text is extremely well written throughout, and explains all underlying concepts in a coherent and engaging way.

I really enjoyed reading the manuscript. In fact, it could have greatly helped my own planning of this past field season. I also appreciate that the authors are transparent about the composition of the authorship group, which helps to contextualise the content of the article. I expect that this paper will be of immediate use for the fast-growing microclimate research community, in particular for early-career scientists. I only made some minor remarks below, mainly concerning specific statements or phrasings, which I hope will be helpful for the authors when finalising their manuscript. Generally, I fully recommend the manuscript for publication – thank you for the opportunity to review this article.

Jonathan von Oppen

Text:
- L295ff: Perhaps it would be useful for readers to provide some examples of loggers using ultra fine-wire thermocouples or “cheaper” ones, or include this information in Table S1?
- L380ff: at least to some degree covering rather T amplitude than temporal resolution? Also applies to Fig. 3. Maybe visualise measurement frequency as marks/lines in the conceptual graphs, and in higher density in dynamic than in more constant environments?
- L445: while this makes sense to me, it might not be immediately clear to readers how this reference to guideline #4 and Fig. 3 (temporal variation) fits with the statement on spatial variation in this sentence – please clarify.
- L453: To me, this alternative describes the rather special study case of species distributions, rather than a general ‘alternative’ to the previous statement. For integrating it better within the paragraph context, it might be worthwhile to first refer to a higher-level aspect of study design (e.g., ‘If interested in contrasting ecological properties of study sites such as presence and absence of focal species’), and then the specific example. Also, I would probably say ‘(un)occupied’ rather than ‘(un)used’, but that might just be personal preference.
- L465f: this example from aquatic ecology is not 100% intuitive for me in an otherwise fully terrestrial-focused paper.
- L476ff: minor comment: this paragraph is the odd one out in terms of subject use (‘a researcher’ vs. ‘one’ or passive voice throughout otherwise). Consider aligning.
- L530: these are all very valid points. In addition, the following logistical aspects may be advantageous to consider:
o including buffer zones to roads, trails or other hotspots of human activity when determining study locations
o similarly, restricting sampling sites to certain distances from trails/roads can be useful to increase efficiency
o loggers themselves might be recognisable with metal detectors, especially those in metal housing or with larger batteries.
- L677ff: minor comment: data analyses (plural) and analysis (singular) are being used inconsistently in this section, and you may want to align them to one or the other.
- L837: I think this should perhaps say ‘time series availability’ or something similar – we don’t want time series to explode :-)

Tables/Figures:
- L1299/Fig. 4: L409ff: This is a nicely designed figure, but I do not think it adds to the message of guideline #4. Surely the interpretation of existing data is not the focus of this paper, so I feel that, as interesting as this figure is from a microclimate ecologist’s view, it is not central to the message of the article as a whole, or guideline #4 in particular. Perhaps moving it to the supplementary material could be a good compromise, but not every section needs to have a figure necessarily. If you really want to keep it in the main text, I suggest that you at least include a reference in guideline 4, and not only in the conclusion, to integrate it better with the manuscript.
- L1319/Fig. 6: Similarly, I find that Fig. 6 does not add much value to the manuscript. I understand that you would like to have a figure providing an overview of Guidelines 7-10 as well, but I feel like it could at least be referenced more often in these sections to improve connectivity between text and figure (in fact, I first overlooked the only reference in Guideline 7 and was surprised to see another figure).

I would like to thank the authors for revising their manuscript, and my fellow reviewer for their insightful feedback. I have some very minor comments remaining, but do not see any major issues preventing publication of the article.
Jonathan von Oppen

Comments:
- L399: I appreciate the addition of a clear example here, but I think it is phrased the wrong way around. Thermal conductance is higher in a dry, sandy substrate compared to moist organic soil.
- L801: This might be a small detail, but I would suggest to add “e.g.” or “see“ to the given reference of Risch et al. (2023), as that paper did not explicitly confirm the preceding statement about the usefulness of data availability, but insteads represents an example for “larger-scale collaborative analyses”.
- L841-843: As word limits seem to be an issue, I suggest to simply leave out the bit “However, until now […] methodological gap.” I do not see a need to argue for the article’s relevance at the end of the article.