TY - JOUR AU - Oakman, Emily C. AU - Hagan, Donald L. AU - Waldrop, Thomas A. AU - Barrett, Kyle PY - 2021 DA - 2021/03/23 TI - Understory community shifts in response to repeated fire and fire surrogate treatments in the southern Appalachian Mountains, USA JO - Fire Ecology SP - 7 VL - 17 IS - 1 AB - Decades of fire exclusion in the southern Appalachian Mountains, USA, has led to changing forest structure and species composition over time. Forest managers and scientists recognize this and are implementing silvicultural treatments to restore forest communities. In this study, conducted at the southern Appalachian Fire and Fire Surrogate Study site in Green River Game Land, North Carolina, USA, we assessed the effects of four fuel-reduction methods (burned four times, B; mechanical treatment two times, M; mechanical treatment two times plus burned four times, MB; and control, C) on the changes in understory community from pre-treatment to post-treatment years (2001 to 2016). We used non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) to determine overall understory community heterogeneity, agglomerative hierarchical cluster analyses (AHCA) to determine finer-scale changes in understory community structure, and indicator species analyses (ISA) to identify the species that were associated with the different fuel reduction treatments over time. SN - 1933-9747 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s42408-021-00097-1 DO - 10.1186/s42408-021-00097-1 ID - Oakman2021 ER -