Effects of structural complexity on environmental heterogeneity (Hypothesis 2)
An increase in structural complexity of the forest canopy resulted in increasing light heterogeneity for SSCI (p = 0.008, r² = 0.28, see Fig. 4), TRI (p = 0.017, r² = 0.42, not shown) and DBHsd (p = 0.007, r² = 0.44, not shown). The soil parameter C:N ratio correlated positively to SSCI (p = 0.0002, r² = 0.14) and DBHsd (p = 0.02, r² = 0.44), and potassium increased positively with SSCI (p = 0.043, r² = 0.41) but after removing extreme values (excluding all values above 1.5 * interquartile range) no effect was found. During model selection forest communities did not remain in the model of best fit and thus are not shown here.