Over 80 years without major disturbance, late successional Białowieża woodlands exhibit complex dynamism, with coherent compositional shifts towards true old‐growth conditions

1. Controversies about successional dynamics of woodland communities have a long history, dating back to the classical debates between Clements and Gleason and continuing into the present. These debates have largely concerned the predictability or convergence of forest developmental trends as well as the relative importance of different mechanisms and forces driving forest succession. However, opportunities for rigorous testing of competing hypotheses are limited, mainly because plot-based studies of forest vegetation spanning more than a decade are scarce and even fewer concern late-successional stands.

2. We exploit a unique long-term data set from mesic temperate forests of eastern Poland, spanning ca. 80 years (1936-2012) in strictly protected, late-successional woodlands assigned to seven different ‘structural types’. We use non-metric multidimensional scaling to assess stability of species composition over the study period. We examine predictability of composition and change tr...