Abstract

Questions Past agricultural land use and forest management have shaped and influenced the understorey composition in European forests for centuries. We investigated whether understorey vegetation assemblages are affected by (a) legacies from a historical infield/outland agricultural system (i.e., a system with nutrient-enriched vs nutrient-depleted areas), (b) recent management intensity (i.e., thinning/felling activities), and (c) the interaction of recent management and potential legacies. Location Oak forests in Skane, south Sweden. Methods We use three vegetation surveys (1983, 1993/94 and 2014) and notes on management and land-use history, available for 62 permanent 500 m(2) plots. We conducted linear mixed effect modelling to detect both main and interactive effects of past land use and recent management on understorey diversity measures and vegetation indicator values for light and fertility. We combined nonmetric multidimensional scaling with permutational multivariate analysis of variance and indicator species analysis to detect compositional differences caused by past land use and/or recent management. Results Understorey diversity was mainly affected by management activities, but the former infield/outland agricultural system was an important determinant of understorey composition. Understorey composition of former infields reflected higher nutrient availability and lower light availability compared to former outland. Past land use and recent management had interactive effects on light-related understorey variables: for the less intensively managed plots, the outland plots contained more light-demanding species than the infield plots, while for the more intensively managed plots, the light-demanding signature of the understorey was similar for infield and outland plots. Conclusions Different intensities of past land use as well as recent forest management influenced the composition of the forest understorey, and interactions were present. Therefore, careful consideration of both the long-term land-use history and the more recent disturbances due to forest management are necessary when making future predictions of understorey composition and diversity.

Keywords

forest herb layer; forest management; land-use history; land-use legacies; past land use; understorey composition; understorey diversity

Published in

Journal of Vegetation Science
2019, Volume: 30, number: 5, pages: 917-928
Publisher: WILEY

SLU Authors

• Brunet, Jörg

  • Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
    

UKÄ Subject classification

Forest Science
Agricultural Science


Publication identifier

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jvs.12770

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/102144