author response to reviewers comments

Abstract

We would like to take the opportunity to thank the three reviewers for highlighting some very important generalisations in our interpretations of changing diatoms, guilds and beta-diversity. We have taken on board all their comments, but this has necessitated some substantial changes to the manuscript. 1. We have moved away from discussing beta-diversity and resources in general because (i) beta-diversity has so many different meaning to different disciplines, and (ii) the reviewers were right to point out that talking about resources in general in a palaeo paper was too vague. 2. We have restructured the discussion somewhat, where we now (i) interpret the major changes to species in C1