The study «Limited impact of microtopography on alpine plant distribution” is a well written and a timely paper. The authors test if elevation or micro-topographic characteristics matters for species distributions and communities of alpine plants. They test at which resolution specific morphometric variables best explain species distributions and community attributes and also test different combinations of variables at different spatial scales to elevation. They find that coarse scale topography explains species distributions and community attribute best.

The study is well introduced and conducted. I have several rather minor comments about justifications, explanations and presentations of the results.

1. While the topic is well introduced, the questions and predictions could be more clearly formulated and explained. For the first approach the best spatial resolution is tested, but this is done for the morphometric variables and elevation. The second approach (testing combinations of variables) should explain the reasoning behind combining random variable.
2. Morphometric variables are used in most model (e.g. L172), however it is not explained what they characterize. I understand that the authors do not want to have the definitions of all the variables in the main manuscript (that can be in the appendix). But it would be useful to explain the general features of these variables, e.g. ruggedness, slope, wetness etc. Also, in the results the abbreviations for the variables are used without any introduction.
3. The analysis needs better explanations. This text describing the first approach is hard to understand. It might be easier to understand if the general structure of the model is explained first, i.e. what the response is and what the predictors are. Or show the model formula. The authors explain why the interaction between elevation and the morphometric variables was used, but they do not justify the quadratic term.

Specific comments

L93: Typo in Austrian Alps

L96: random combination of predictors?

L114: “there” is not needed.

L119: “…as summer maximum of the year” is unclear, what does this refer to?

L128: When was species cover estimated? At peak growing season?

L130: some words are missing in this sentence

L139: say how many and which EIVs here.

L145: unclear if weighted or unweighted EIVs or both describe properties of communities.

L153: Sentence is unclear. 253 traits from 56 species from the 900 plots were measured? “253 records” is unclear.

L193: We fitted models for… instead of calculated models.

L231: Is this data presented somwhere? The same goes for the community attributes. It says Appendix S2 but I could not find it or any figure/table (L262).

L246: What about the only elevation model for the community attributes?

L268: Is this across all species?

L278 onwards: Is this from Figure 4? If yes, please refer to that figure in the text. The resolution is not mentioned in this paragraph. Is that because it is independent of the resolution (= the same for both fine and coarse resolution). Please explain.

L290: Earlier the authors mention that species and communities should not be compared.

L297 onwards: This text is extremely hard to read and process. It would be easier if this was visualized or presented in a table. Also the correlation with topography is mentioned here. Was this calculated?

Figure 2 + 3: Indicate more clearly what the yellow and blue bars are and the red diamond. One can guess from the order but it’s not clear. E.g. fine (yellow), coarse (blue) etc. And the sorting is by done by the explained variation in the mixed resolution models, or not? Any resolution is confusing.

Figure 5: It’s not clear how this figure helps to explain the concept. It would help to show the different scales (fine vs coarse) on the figure and how the coarse scale better predicts the species distribution.