Dynamics and recovery of forest understory biodiversity over 17 years following varying levels of retention harvesting

1. Retention harvesting is advocated as an alternative to intensive timber harvesting, such as clear-cutting, to better maintain or facilitate recovery of biodiversity and other ecological values in managed forests. However, it is not clear how long the benefits of retention harvests persist. 2. We investigated responses of understory vascular plant cover, richness, diversity (inverse Simpson index), and composition to a gradient in dispersed retention (2% [clear-cut], 10%, 20%, 50% and 75% retention; unharvested reference [100% retention]) at 3, 6, 11, and 17 years after harvest, in four boreal mixed wood forest types (deciduous (broadleaf)-dominated, deciduous-dominated with conifer understory, mixed, and conifer-dominated) in western Canada. 3. Understory cover and richness tended to increase in the short-term (3 years), peaked at 6–11 years with differences following the gradient of harvesting intensity, then plateaued or declined in the second decade (17 years), by which time there..., , , # Plot-level data on understory vascular plant abundance following varying levels of retention harvesting Data were acquired through long-term field observations as part of the Ecosystem Management Emulating Natural Disturbance (EMEND) project ([http://emend.ualberta.ca](http://emend.ualberta.ca)). ## Description of the Data and file structure Data are provided in the sheets named Compartment-CoverType, Compartment-Treatments and Understory_veg_data, and column headings are defined in the Description sheet of the excel workbook. Bartels_and_Macdonald 2023-for Dryad Depository.xlsx. Updates to species names (minor typos and duplicates) were made in May 2024.