The contemporary state of functional traits and species richness in plant communities depends on legacy effects of past disturbances. Whether temporal responses of community properties to current environmental changes are altered by such legacies is, however, unknown. We expect global environmental changes to interact with land-use legacies given different community trajectories initiated by prior management, and subsequent responses to altered resources and conditions. We tested this expectation for species richness and functional traits using 1814 survey-resurvey plot pairs of understorey communities from 40 European temperate forest datasets, syntheses of management transitions since the year 1800, and a trait database. We also examined how plant community indicators of resources and conditions changed in response to management legacies and environmental change. Community trajectories were clearly influenced by interactions between management legacies from over 200 years ago and environmental change. Importantly, higher rates of nitrogen deposition led to increased species richness and plant height in forests managed less intensively in 1800 (i.e., high forests), and to decreases in forests with a more intensive historical management in 1800 (i.e., coppiced forests). There was evidence that these declines in community variables in formerly coppiced forests were ameliorated by increased rates of temperature change between surveys. Responses were generally apparent regardless of sites' contemporary management classifications, although sometimes the management transition itself, rather than historic or contemporary management types, better explained understorey responses. Main effects of environmental change were rare, although higher rates of precipitation change increased plant height, accompanied by increases in fertility indicator values. Analysis of indicator values suggested the importance of directly characterising resources and conditions to better understand legacy and environmental change effects. Accounting for legacies of past disturbance can reconcile contradictory literature results and appears crucial to anticipating future responses to global environmental change.

Białowieża Geobotanical Station Faculty of Biology University of Warsaw Białowieża Poland

Botany Department School of Natural Sciences Trinity College Dublin Dublin 2 Ireland

Département de Biologie Université de Sherbrooke Sherbrooke QC Canada

Department of Biological Sciences Marshall University Huntington WV USA

Department of Botany Faculty of Biological Sciences University of Wrocław Wrocław Poland

Department of Botany Faculty of Science Palacký University in Olomouc Olomouc Czech Republic

Department of Ecology and Ecosystem Management Technische Universität München Freising Germany

Department of Ecology University of Rzeszów Rzeszów Poland

Department of Forest Ecology Faculty of Forestry and Wood Sciences Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Prague 6 Suchdol Czech Republic

Department of GIS and Remote Sensing Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences Průhonice Czech Republic

Department of Plant Production Ghent University Melle Gontrode Belgium

Department of Plant Sciences University of Oxford Oxford UK

Department of Plant Systematics Ecology and Theoretical Biology L Eötvös University Budapest Hungary

Department of Vegetation Ecology Institute of Botany of the Czech Academy of Sciences Brno Czech Republic

Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation University of Florida Gainesville FL USA

Department Silviculture and Forest Ecology of the Temperate Zones Georg August University Göttingen Göttingen Germany

Environment Agency Austria Vienna Austria

Environmental Systems Analysis Group Wageningen University AA Wageningen the Netherlands

Faculty of Biology and Preclinical Medicine Institute of Plant Sciences University of Regensburg Regensburg Germany

Faculty of Forestry Technical University in Zvolen Zvolen Slovakia

Forest and Nature Lab Faculty of Bioscience Engineering Ghent University Melle Gontrode Belgium

General Botany Institute of Biochemistry and Biology University of Potsdam Potsdam Germany

Institute of Ecology and Evolution Friedrich Schiller University Jena Jena Germany

Laboratorio de Investigaciones Botánicas CONICET Facultad de Ciencias Naturales Universidad Nacional de Salta Salta Argentina

Leibniz Centre for Agricultural Landscape Research Müncheberg Germany

Museum of Natural History University of Wrocław Wroclaw Poland

National Forest Centre Zvolen Slovakia

Research Institute for Nature and Forest Brussel Belgium

School of Biological Sciences The University of Western Australia Crawley WA Australia

Southern Swedish Forest Research Centre Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences Alnarp Sweden

Unité de recherche Ecologie et Dynamique des Systèmes Anthropisés Université de Picardie Jules Verne Amiens Cedex 1 France

Vegetation Ecology and Conservation Biology Institute of Ecology University of Bremen Bremen Germany

Wageningen Environmental Research AA Wageningen the Netherlands

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