Understory percent cover, plant traits, canopy LAI, PAR, temperature, and soil moisture data at multiple time points for sites in the burn chronosequence and Indian Point forest at the University of Michigan Biological Station, Pellston, MI (2022-2023)

Community ecology has sought to understand the mechanisms by which plant communities are assembled through time and space. One prominent way to address how communities are assembled is by quantifying functional traits. While there is a tremendous body of literature on functional traits, debate persists about how to account for variation in measured traits. For example, intraspecific trait variation (ITV) can be equal to or greater than interspecific trait variation and ITV has also been found to vary greatly across years. Therefore, there is a need to account for variability in functional trait measures among and within species and through time to improve our understanding of community assembly. Chronosequences are a powerful tool to address temporal changes in community dynamics, however, the inclusion of understory plants in forest chronosequence studies is still relatively uncommon. Previous chronosequence studies have been primarily performed in grasslands or in a limited subset of forest types, so further work is needed in understory plant traits across other ecosystems and climates to improve trait-based understanding of understory plant communities through time. Additionally, because plant traits change as ecosystems age, community interactions are likely to change with ecosystem age. Interactions of particular interest are herbivory, arthropod predation, and the influence of plant traits on arthropod diversity.