Dear authors,

Thank you for considering the comments from the two reviewers in order to improve your manuscript. I see several improvements but also for some issues that need to be solved before the manuscript can be published in SOIL:
1.) Terminology is not clear and partly incorrect. Authors did not follow suggestions of reviewer 2 to provide definitions for terms such as "deep horizons" or "natural soil". "Topsoil uptake" is incorrect and has be changed to e.g."topsoil removal". "Waste material" is incorrect too since soil material is no waste, even though it has to be removed for construction purposes.
2.) You ignored six comments without any explanation (reviewer 1) and did not follow many other suggestions of the reviewers that would be helpful or required to improve the paper. For example additional tables were proposed by reviewer 1 (result equations) and reviewer 2 (site characteristics). Please reconsider all comments from the two reviewers and provide explanations if you do not follow their suggestions.
3.) Incorrect and missing citations. Reviewer 2 suggested to refer to Kautz et al. 2013, Soil Biology and Biochemistry, Vol 57, p 1003-1002 on earthworm effects. References are incomplete (e.g. Zalasiewicz et al.) and partly incorrect (term "Anthropocene" is derived from Eugene F. Stoermer and promoted by Paul Crutzen and not from Zalasiewicz et al.). Please check all citations in order to refer to the original data source.
4.) Page 4: Parent material is for sure not untouched by plants and animals (see reviewer 2). Plant roots can reach several meters in depth and soil fauna such as microorganisms are everywhere in the soil and sediment. Thus, change to "parent materials have hardly been subjected to the activities of organisms...".

Looking forward to a thoroughly revised version of your paper
Best regards,
Axel Don

Dear authors,

Thank you for revising the paper by taking into account my comments. I see that this paper is now ready to be published in SOIL and I hope it finds a broad audience.

Best regards,
Axel Don

Thanks for submitting your work to SOIL. The paper is now ready but before submitting your final ms, I would like to ask you to carefully go through the manuscript and verify the grammatical accuracy and overall readability of the text.

K Van Oost