See attached file.

The authors made a substantial revisions to the manuscript and this version reads like a completely different article. I commend the authors for considering the suggestions of the reviewers fully and making substantive changes.

I found the spatial analysis in this version to be much more thorough and led a set of very compelling conclusions. In particular, the discussion about spatial patterns in litter stabilization and soil organic matter is an interesting advance.

The model assumptions are more thoroughly described in this version, which is a great improvement. Furthermore, this version includes more information about the data cleaning and processing steps.

Additional comments:

The data accessibility statement includes information about publishing the summary data with mention of a platform for raw data, but it is not definitive. Additionally, there is a lack of information about the software (i.e., code) that was used to both clean and process the data as well as generate the figures and statistical analysis. It may not be required, but it is in the best interest of the scientific field if the code is shared as well. I recognized that this was a tremendous amount of work by the authors and a very rich dataset, which often leads some researchers to be resistant to open science. However, I humbly suggest that the authors consider sharing more.

Figure 3 is missing a y-axis label on panel B. This axis is not “Decomposition rate” like in panel A so it needs it’s own axis label. Alternatively, you could stack the plots vertically since the x-axis is the same on both panels.

Also, in Figure 3 I would suggest using “Soil MAT” rather than just MAT. At first glance I assumed this was air temperature and it was only upon reading the caption to see that this is soil temp.

Supplemental – There is a table with a file name of “TableS3” but I believe this should be table S5. Please adjust the naming of the file.

Line 447 – I believe “warmer locations k1 decreases and STBI increases” should be reversed. According to figure 3, k1 is increasing with precipitation at 25° and STBI is decreasing.