I enjoyed reading this paper and thank the authors for their work. The authors report on a survey within the German Geo.X research network which aimed to understand facets of interdisciplinary working in the geosciences. It is a very interesting and well-written article, which makes a valuable contribution particularly in identifying ways in which early career scientists would benefit from support in interdisciplinary working and exploring the complexities of interdisciplinarity (and cross-disciplinary working more generally). The approach and methods used are valid and are described clearly and in detail. The paper’s conclusions follow on appropriately from the results presented and are discussed in the context of relevant literature. Appropriate figures are used to present the results and the paper is appropriately structured.

I would recommend publication, subject to the minor corrections suggested below.

Title: should there be a ‘the’ before ‘Geosciences’? Later on line 32 ‘the geosciences’ is used.

Abstract:

Line 25: rephrase ‘the increasing coordination efforts’ to ‘the increasing efforts to coordinate interdisciplinary work’ or similar.

Line 26: add ‘and’ after ‘initiating’?

Figure 1: Should ‘sectorial’ be ‘sectoral’? Would it be possible to give some examples of the ‘hybrid fields’ noted here?

Line 55: Would it be worth adding ‘physical geography’ or ‘geography’ after ‘Earth Sciences’ here? In the UK, at least, man if not all of the disciplines would be grouped in geography departments.

Line 72: Add a definition of early career scientists here.

Line 74: Specify when the retreat took place.

Line 81: delete ‘where we intend’.

Line 84: replace ‘interdisciplinary’ with ‘in interdisciplinary ways’ or similar.

Line 103: Rephrase start of sentence to ‘Data collection and processing…’

Lines 112-113: How does academic age relate to the definition of ECS?

Line 258-260: This is an important point – would you then expect more interdisciplinary collaboration by established researchers because they have more control over the nature of their projects?

Line 357: add ‘with’ after ‘ECS.’

This is a very timely article given that many (all) of us are grappling with interdisciplinarity and interdisciplinary ways of working. I very much enjoyed reading this from the perspective of ECRs. The approach/methodology utilised was appropriate, and it was good to see the team were aware of potential biases in their dataset. There is a good number of response on which the findings are based. This is a well-written piece. I particularly liked the 'sankey' diagrams for displaying the findings - visually these were very effective. 

This article should be accepted for publication, with a few minor points to consider:

1. Could 'within' replace 'in' in the article title, and perhaps add 'the' before Geosciences.

2. Within the Ethic Statement, is there an internal ethics approval code that can be quoted? This is typical in my institution, but I appreciate this may not be universal. 

3. Should Earth Sciences be defined to include physical geography, environmental sciences, and geology?

4. Why a maximum 'academic age' of 20 years to reflect ECRs? Many funding schemes have a cut-off for ECRs of 8 years post-PhD. Can this be clarified?

5. As AI wasn't used to automatically extract categories (lines 128-130), does this need to be stated?

6. When did the Geo.X ECR retreat take place (line 74)? Can this be stated?

7. Replace 'roughly' with approximately, too colloquial, i.e., line 355.