tokens: for % of the total instantaneous flux, and % of the total maximum flux, in good agreement with the results of Lamb et al. (2013) . Here and in the next paragraph again, we assume that, the term “total instantaneous (maximum) flux” corresponds to the sum of instantaneous (maximum) fluxes in those events considered in the context. 8. Cancellation in Lamb et al. (2013) accounts for % of the total flux. If we leave out the fluxes contained in surviving features in semi and partial cancellation (as done in Lamb et al. 2013 ), we obtain % total instantaneous flux and % total maximum flux that corresponds to cancellation event, which is comparable to the results obtained by Lamb et al. (2013) . 4.5. Lifetimes of the features In Fig. 11 we plot histograms of lifetimes of the features, where the lifetime is determined as described in Sect. 3.3 . A correction factor was proposed by Danilovic et al. (2010) to avoid underestimating the lifetimes for the same observations, as the duration of the time-series is itself comparable to the lifetimes of longer-lived features. The suggested weight to be multiplied to each bin of the lifetime distribution is , where is the number of frames a feature lives, and is the total number of frames. We show lifetime histograms before (yellow-shaded) and after (gray-shaded) applying the correction factor. The plotted histograms are for the two extreme ratios of the areas of the children or parents, 10:1 and 2:1 respectively. Nearly % and % of the features for the 10:1 and 2:1 cases respectively, in the lifetime histograms live for just one time step. The more restrictive the area-ratio criterion restricting the death of features, the larger the number of long lived features, since a higher number of splitting and merging events are not counted as contributing to the birth or death of the larger feature (although for the smaller features they are involved in these events). Fig. 12 Lifetimes of features for an area ratio criterion 5:1 vs. maximum fluxes (panel a) ) and maximum, average magnetic field strength values from COG technique (panel b) ). Here maximum refers to the maximum value of the magnetic flux or the field strength, gained during the entire lifetime of the feature. In panel a) the range of plotted maximum flux of feature is limited to Mx to enhance the visibility of flux-lifetime relationship. The over-plotted red cross symbols represent the average value of the maximum flux of features at each lifetime (see main text for details). The maximum averaged over each lifetime bin are displayed in the figure and are represented by over-plotted red cross symbols. The mean and median lifetimes are and min ( and s) respectively for the 10:1 case and are and min ( and s) respectively for the 2:1 case. Similar lifetimes were also reported by Zhou et al. (2010) . These small mean and median lifetimes are clearly dominated by the large number of features that live for just one time step. Thus, the mean lifetimes we
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