Do diverse overstoreys induce diverse understoreys? Lessons learnt from an experimental-observational platform in Finland

Neither research approach found a clear relation between tree species richness and understorey diversity. The presence of tree species identity effects may partially have skewed the diversity relations. However, results on interplot compositional dissimilarity indicated that creating mixtures using a chessboard pattern of monocultures may positively influence understorey diversity at the forest level.