Table 1.
Some scenarios of possible consequences for understory plants due to different combinations of changes in the four limiting scenarios.
Fig 1.
A conceptual diagram of this study’s analysis to complement the overview given in the second paragraph of the methods.
For clarity, Section 1 shows hypothetical data for a canopy tree (1a) and a spring ephemeral herb (1b), Sections 1d-f and 2–4 show only one of many possible years (1995–2017 for herbs and 1995–2022 for saplings) of data or model outputs, and Sections 3–5 show only one sapling species. The herb and sapling analyses follow the same general pattern, although with more complications due to phenological complexity of some herb species (see Methods: Section 3).
Fig 2.
Canopy light transmission in Trelease Woods in 2002.
The black dots show observed ratio between understory irradiance and irradiance in a nearby open area on clear days in 2002 (I/I0). The brown lines (solid and dashed) show modeled light transmittance by trunks and branches in the leafless forest (see Methods: Section 2). The green line shows canopy light transmittance as modeled using the trunk and branch model, plus canopy leafing phenology data. Thus, the brown and green thick solid lines together show the entire year’s course of modeled understory light. Calibrations from these 2002 observations were used to estimate daily understory light in all study years (see Methods: Section 2).
Fig 3.
The relative importance of four factors in limiting the light interception of understory plants.
The bars are the standard deviations of the corresponding bars in S1 and S2 Figs. The species are grouped by life history and seasonality, as indicated between the bars and species’ names. Abbreviations: A-W: autumn-winter, WP: winter perennial, WA: winter annual.