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Peatlands have been drained for land use for a long time and on a large scale, turning them from carbon and nutrient sinks into respective sources, diminishing water regulation capacity, causing surface height loss and destroying biodiversity. Over the last decades, drained peatlands have been rewetted for biodiversity restoration and, as it strongly decreases greenhouse gas emissions, also for climate protection. We quantify restoration success by comparing 320 rewetted fen peatland sites to 243 near-natural peatland sites of similar origin across temperate Europe, all set into perspective by 10k additional European fen vegetation plots. Results imply that rewetting of drained fen peatlands induces the establishment of tall, graminoid wetland plants (helophytisation) and long-lasting differences to pre-drainage biodiversity (vegetation), ecosystem functioning (geochemistry, hydrology), and land cover characteristics (spectral temporal metrics). The Paris Agreement entails the rewetting of 500,000 km2 of drained peatlands worldwide until 2050-2070. A better understanding of the resulting locally novel ecosystems is required to improve planning and implementation of peatland rewetting and subsequent management.

Abstract. Until the 1960s, species‐rich vegetation on minero‐trophic peaty soüs (fen sites) were characteristic of the alluvial plains in Schleswig‐Holstein (Northwest Germany). Today, many of these habitats undergo successional changes due to abandonment. Vegetation development after abandonment can be characterized as a sequence of different successional stages and described in terms of a successional model. Successional stage I includes grazed, mown and recently abandoned sites without dominants. Stages II and III are characterized by the dominance of highly competitive herbaceous species whüe stage IV consists of woody vegetation. Ca. 3000 phytosociological relevés were assigned to the respective successional stages. Mean cover values were calculated for 250 species of the regional fen flora and assigned to successional categories according to their changes in cover in the successional series. According to our results 141 species decrease during succession, while 100 species were restricted to early successional stages and 85 species increased. Abandonment of all fen sites in Schleswig‐Holstein will probably lead to the regional loss of 23 species of the fen flora. To identify mechanisms underlying successional change, the successional categories were correlated with life history traits and ecological requirements of the species. Results indicate that both light competition and limitation of sexual reproduction of small‐seeded species might play a major role in the decrease and extinction of species during succession. Finally, conservation strategies for endangered species in a cultural landscape are discussed.

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Lines 376-378: I don't see the direct link between homogenization and equality of change among losers and winners. Either prove/show the link mathematically, or drop the statement.Probably, this disagreement is based on how we define homogeneity. In our opinion, homogenization is the direct consequence of redistribution of the species' cover. If decreases are distributed more equally (that is also more homogeneously) across many species and increases in cover are concentrated in few species, the latter (that is the winners) will be increasing in many communities. In consequence, the dissimilarity in species composition between these communities has to decrease (given that a quantitative dissimilarity measure is used). Mathematically, this would have to be shown by a decrease in dissimilarity, which however, is difficult to demonstrate across all plot records in our data set as many communities have no species in common. In our opinion, homogenization probably occurs within habitat types, but opening this discussion and carrying out the analysis would open a can of worms. Thus, we have decided to down-tune this statement to: "Homogenisation occurs because, across all time series, few species consistently increase in their cover, meaning that the same species are winning in many communities." (new l 372-374)Referee #3 (Remarks to the Author):As before, I commend the authors on their analyses and believe this paper makes a novel and important contribution by documenting long-term plant biodiversity changes in terms of cover that would have been missed by simply focusing on species richness, as most previous work has done. But while the authors have produced a strong revision of their paper, in my opinion several outstanding issues remain, and some important comments have only been partially addressed. I appreciate the new analyses that the authors have performed, and overall the analyses are appropriate and justified, and data are presented correctly, as far as I can judge. The framing of the study is also now more compelling, and I think the unique value of the dataset and insights arising from it are now harnessed more effectively. That said, I still have some concerns about the framing of the study, explained in my comments below. The Results section has also been improved, but remains difficult to read in places -again, I make specific suggestions below. Overall, while the length appears to have been reduced, the text still seems unnecessarily wordy in places (e.g. in the Results and figure captions).Thank you for this positive assessment.Another aspect I raised previously and has still not been resolved, in my opinion, is when results are considered to be ecologically relevant or not, and I think there could be greater transparency in the paper about this. This relates to the way the story is set-up, as mentioned in my previous review. Specifically, the authors note that due to the large sample sizes, changes in species richness can be statistically significant even if effect sizes are small, and therefore conc...