Silviculture can be a powerful tool for restoring and enhancing habitat for forest-dependent wildlife. In eastern North America, regenerating timber harvests support abundant wildflowers that provide essential forage for native pollinators. Factors driving floral resource availability within regenerating forests remain almost entirely unstudied. Recent efforts to increase the area of regenerating forests (< 10 yr old) through overstory removal harvest in the central Appalachian Mountains provide an opportunity to investigate the development of wildflower communities following canopy removal. We conducted 1,208 blooming plant surveys across 143 harvests, recording 1,525,245 flowers representing 220 taxa spanning 47 families. Flower abundance within recently harvested stands was negatively associated with fern and sapling cover but positively associated with grass and bramble (Rubus spp.) cover. Early in the growing season, more flowers bloomed in older stands (e.g., > 5 yr old) but this pattern reversed by the end of the growing season. Ultimately, our study demonstrates that the abundance of flowers available to pollinators within regenerating hardwood stands varies with factors associated with advancing succession. Recognizing the potential tradeoff between woody regeneration (i.e., saplings) and pollinator forage availability may benefit forest managers who intend to provide floral resources to flower-dependent wildlife like pollinators via silviculture.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.