Unravelling mechanisms of short-term vegetation dynamics in complex coppice forest systems Roberto Canullo & Enrico Simonetti & Marco Cervellini & Stefano Chelli & Sándor Bartha & Camilla Wellstein & Giandiego Campetella Received: 31 May 2015 / Revised: 00 Month 0000 /Accepted: 29 November 2016 # Institute of Botany, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic 2017 Abstract The silvicultural management of coppicing has been very common in deciduous forests in many European countries. After decades of decline of this practice, socio-economic changes might induce a reviv- al valuing the biomass as a resource. New insights in the ecological processes that regulate plant diversity are relevant for a sustainable forest management. While studies on long-term changes are available, the short- term dynamics of the coppice forest understorey has not yet been explored. In this context, it is interesting to evaluate the species compositional changes, including the processes of species turnover and species impover- ishment (nestedness) and to investigate the role of plant functional traits. For this purpose, we resampled a chronosequence of complex coppice beech forests of the Central Apennines (Italy) monitoring the short- time species dynamics of five years (i.e. from 2006 to 2011) in three age classes, i.e. post-logged, recovering and old coppice stands (0–16, 17–31 and > 32 years, respectively). In contrast to our expectation, declining species richness appeared only in the recovering stands, while the landscape scale (between-stand) heterogene- ity, except for post-logged and recovering stands in 2011, did not change over five years. Significant tem- poral nestedness was found in each stage of succession. However, the rate of species turnover and species im- poverishment do not significantly differ among the three age classes, indicating their constant importance along the forest regeneration after disturbance. Only in the early stage of forest regeneration after coppicing, spe- cies compositional changes are reflected by functional changes with surviving understorey species having clonal regeneration traits. Our results suggest an overall landscape-scale stability (and sustainability) of this cop- pice forest system. We conclude with management in- dications, highlighting the importance of maintaining the traditional local approach (coppicing with standards in small 0.5–1.0 ha sized management units with a ca 30-year rotation cycle) where active coppice parcels are interspersed by abandoned stands. Keywords alpha and beta diversity . clonal traits . forest management . plant functional traits . species turnover . temporal nestedness . understorey vegetation Folia Geobot DOI 10.1007/s12224-016-9264-x Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12224-016-9264-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. R. Canullo : E. Simonetti : M. Cervellini : S. Chelli (*) : G. Campetella School of Biosciences and Veterinary Medicine, Plant Diversity and Ecosystems Management Unit, University of Camerino, Via Pontoni, 5, I-62032 Camerino, Italy e-mail: stefano.chelli@gmail.com S. Bartha MTA Centre for Ecological Research, Institute of Ecology and Botany, Vácrátót H-2163, Hungary S. Bartha School of Plant Biology, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Hughway, Crawley, WE 6009, Australia C. Wellstein Faculty of Science and Technology, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Piazza Università 5, I-39100 Bozen, Italy