{"paper_id":"21c99fa5-18a0-49cd-b2a6-4751eecf2300","body_text":"This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.\nYou must log in to post a comment.\nThere are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.\nThis is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint.\nAdd a Comment\nYou must log in to post a comment.\nComments\nThere are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article.\nResprouting is a key mechanism of recovery after aboveground damage and strongly influences forest regeneration and dynamics. This is also true in heavy-snow Japanese beech forests, where canopy-gap formation and snow pressure damage woody species. Understanding how light environment and disturbance season shape resprouting is therefore essential for interpreting life-history strategies and informing forest management. To address this, we tested two hypotheses: (1) the stage-shift hypothesis, which predicts that the relative importance of ecological drivers shifts across resprouting stages, and (2) the leaf habit hypothesis, which predicts that the magnitude of seasonal effects on resprouting differs between evergreen and deciduous species.\nWe conducted winter and spring cutting experiments on woody species in the understory of a secondary Japanese beech forest and quantified resprout initiation and growth over two years. We tested the effects of stump size, light environment, and cutting season on resprouting responses and whether seasonal effects differed between leaf habits.\nResprout initiation was driven by stump size, whereas light environment and cutting season had little influence. In contrast, first-year growth was enhanced by stump size and winter cutting, while second-year growth was more strongly associated with post-cutting light environment, indicating a shift in resource dependence across resprouting stages. Winter cutting tended to have a stronger positive effect in deciduous than in evergreen species. Overall, the importance of ecological drivers changed across resprouting stages and between leaf habits, highlighting light availability and disturbance season as key determinants of resprout growth for forest management.\nhttps://doi.org/10.32942/X27T02\nLife Sciences\nResprouting, forest management, light environment, cutting season, leaf habit\nPublished: 2026-05-02 07:00\nLast Updated: 2026-05-02 07:00\nCC BY Attribution 4.0 International\nConflict of interest statement:\nNone\nData and Code Availability Statement:\nOpen data/code are not currently available. Data and analytical code will be made publicly available upon publication.\nLanguage:\nEnglish","source_license":"CC-BY-4.0","license_restricted":false}