Section 5.4 "These differences can be accentuated for systems lacking significant current star formation..." (wording suggestion) --> "Offsets from the locus formed by starbursting and normal starforming galaxies can be particularly pronounced for systems lacking..." --Thanks "The LVL survey provides a unique population for exploring this relation...: (wording suggestion) --> "The LVL survey provides a unique sample for exploring the relationship between the infrared-to-ultraviolet ratio and the ultraviolet slope..." --Thanks "as it consists of a large sample of star-forming..." (wording suggestion) --> "as it consists of a statistically complete set of star forming..." --Thanks "with the latter formally known as a post-starburst galaxy" need a reference --Added one. "plot a version of the 'birthrate parameter'" (wording suggestion) --> "plot an observable tracer of the 'birthrate parameter'" --Thanks "the ratio of FUV/NIR luminosities is used as a proxy..." (wording suggestion) --> "the ratio of FUV/NIR luminosities is used as a measure..." Need a short sentence or two after this to explain why FUV/NIR represents the birthrate (i.e., FUV emission traces SFR over the last 100 Myr, while NIR is a tracer of the total mass etc...). --Done Give the reader a sense of the range of extinctions computed from the recipe of Buat et al. (2005), perhaps provide a histogram. --Good idea. I've added a figure and a bit of discussion. The H-alpha EW is also an observable indicator of the birthrate, which is less affected by extinction. It would be interesting to see another plot of Fig 7, but with H-alpha EW on the y-axis. Using the H-alpha EW also has the advantage that it is indpendent of the parameters that go into computing the x-axis. --Good idea, and I've added it. last paragraph More explanation regarding the models might be useful here. The models simply all have constant SFR, correct? Is the only difference in the models the amount of time they have been forming stars at this constant rate? There are no bursts of star formation superimposed on this continuous component, correct? The reason I ask is because it gets somewhat confusing since the term "oldest star formation episodes" (implying some discontinuity in the SF) is used in the last sentence. The interpretation here also needs to be developed a bit more and more clearly explained. What do you mean by star formation timescales? Are you saying that the galaxies plotted in Figure 7 have ages between a few Gyrs and some are consistent with models that are as young as 8-10 Myrs old? I am guessing that this is not the claim, but this needs to be clarified. --The models are all constant SFR, and they only differ in the amount of time they have been forming stars (what I refer to as "timescale"). To clarify I've changed "oldest" to "longest-lasting" and I've removed "1 solar mass per year" in the y-axis units (it doesn't matter at which rate the constant SFR occurs...). Given that I'm assuming constant SF, isn't it reasonable for the systems that are currently dominated by star formation to be best represented by 8-10 Myr old populations, and the SF-quiescent systems to be best represented by models of Gyrs of star formation? Yes, I realize that the approach is simplistic and I haven't done anything with burst models. I could repeat the analysis using burst only, or a combination of burst+constant, but then the diagram gets messy. I could add more diagrams, but I'm not sure its warranted given all the unknowns---I'm going more for the conceptual picture than the absolute numbers. I have modified the text to clarify the caveats. What is the physical explanation for galaxies with lower birthrates to lie farther from the starburst curve? There are probably a number of factors at play here, but some of the obvious things (i.e., populations responsible for dust heating and differential extinction between young and old stellar populations) could be mentioned. --I was simply thinking that lower birthrate (lower FUV/NIR) means that the bulk of the star formation occurred long ago, and hence their luminosity is dominated more by the old, red stellar population. Hence the significant deviation from the starburst curve. I have tried to clarify this in the manuscript, but I like the alternative of differential extinction, and so I have added that possibility to the text, too. Figure 6. "the solid curve is applicable to normal star-forming galaxies" but it looks like the solid curve traces the upper bound of the LVL locus rather than providing an adequate fit. --Daniela has noted this, too, and I'm still thinking about what it could mean. I did a sanity check, and the data are not plotted incorrectly. They definitely lie redwards of SINGS targets. Figure 7. Using the term birthrate parameter on the left hand axis is somewhat confusing. A commonly adopted definition of the birthrate parameter is the ratio of the current SFR to the lifetime average SFR (e.g., Kennicutt et al. 1994). With this definition, the birthrate values of normal spiral galaxies should be <1 and starbursts would have birthrates above 2-3 (e.g., Lee et al. 2008), and so at first glance the plot, with the majority normal late-type galaxies having "birthrates" >2, may be confusing. What is plotted is an observational diagnostic of the birthrate parameter and not the parameter itself. A suggestion is to remove it from the axis label and to include an explain what the left hand axis represents in the caption. --Done ====================================================================== Sections 1 & 2 Kennicutt et al. (2008) should be referenced for more information on the compilation of data which went into the first few columns of Table 1. You might offer a brief description based upon the information given there. --Done Julianne also has submitted a ANGST (Dalcanton et al. 2009) paper which should be referenced in Sections 1 and 2. A sentence like "For details on the sample selection and properties of the precursor 11HUGS and ANGST surveys, the reader is referred to..." --Done A general idea for a figure to be added would be one that illustrates the improvement of IR parameter space coverage with the addition of the LVL observations to those that existed previously. This would help bolster the intro/sample sections and help motivate the survey. --Good idea. I have added a new figure: 70/160 and TIR vs TIR/B. Section 3 You might consider including UV-160 micron image montages of a small sample of galaxies which span a range of IR properties. --I've added placeholders that include UV/Ha/3.6/8.0/24/70 using a pretty spiral and an irregular. 160um isn't that conceptually different than 70um, and since it's lower resolution I'd like to leave it out. Section 4 The plot comparing the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog magnitudes with your photometry should be included. --Done Section 5 Fig. 3 is a nice plot. With respect to the non-detections, does heavily smoothing the data help to beat down the noise and enable a measurement of the integrated flux? Any way of implementing some sort of stacking for the non-detections (or perhaps comment on the possibility in the text). --Hmm... I don't have much experience in this area, so I would first like to discuss this with experts (in case I'd screw it up!). I know that I'm hesitant to do this at the longest wavelengths, as the 70 and 160um maps are 'chock-full' of noise bumps here and there, and could easily lead to false positives if I got too carried away with smoothing and probing into the noise. I like the stacking idea, especially if we wanted to compute realistic infrared luminosity functions at the faint end. I have added a note about stacking to the text. "standard" reference --> do you mean "fiducial" reference or something more like "visual aid" --I like both of your suggestions; I've adopted 'fiducial' since it sounds more sophisticated! Another general analysis that could be added is that for luminosity functions of the sample (e.g., M_B, M_K and L_TIR) . Normalization will be off, as I've discussed in Lee et al. (2008), but faint end slopes may be interesting to look at. --We talked about this in Long Beach, and the gist of the conversation was that we'd reserve this for a separate paper. Figures 1) A replacement figure, w/o the background sky fill, was e-mailed. Just wanted to make sure you got it. Caption: "The Local Volume Legacy employs a tiered observing strategy and is obtaining MIPS and IRAC imaging for i) all known galaxies in the inner cones... and ii) a magnitude-limited sample to $m_B$... These Spitzer data complement the groundbased H$\alpha$ and GALEX UV imaging already available throughout the volume from 11HUGS and ACS imaging of resolved stellar populations within the inner cone from ANGST." --Got it, and used it. 2) Caption: "Distributions of RC3 type (top left), apparent B magnitude (top right), Galactic latitude (bottom left) and distance (bottom right) for the Local Volume Legacy galaxy sample. The shaded portions of the histograms portray the inner-tier sample for which ACS imaging is available from the ANGST program." --Thanks 3) Maybe add a sentence in caption stating that detection rate is excellent for B