Interactive comment on “Alaskan soil carbon stocks: spatial variability and dependence on environmental factors” by U. Mishra and W. J. Riley

General Comments The discussion paper offers interesting results and a welcome alternative to assessing the soil carbon stocks and changes in Alaska. The equilibrium model approach is particularly helpful since the only other alternative to addressing the question of SOC response to warming seems to be process model outputs (i.e. “ESM’s” in the paper). The map is probably an improvement over other soil carbon maps and, as the authors point out, there is a need for spatial datasets to help improve and test model outputs. A couple of results that I found most revealing were: 1) that soil carbon stocks respond to warming; specifically, that there is a net loss of SOC