Within each stand, a 20 x 30 m (0.06 ha) vegetation plot will be established (for one small black locust stand, the plot will be 10 x 30 m). Plots will be located with the central axis along an elevational contour and the starting point will be chosen randomly from a 100 m2 area. Plots will be located at least 5 m from the stand edge. Within plots, all woody plants >0.5 m in height will be identified and placed in size classes depending on their DBH (0-1, 1-2, 2-5 and 5 cm increments to 40 cm, all trees above 40 cm DBH will be measured to the nearest cm). For some dense plots, sub-sampling will be used to estimate stem densities. Each plot will consist of 6 (or 3) 10 x 10 m modules. Within each module, cover for all vascular plants will be estimated using either a visual or a transect technique and average values used in the analysis. For each black locust stand, 2-5 of the largest black locust trees will be cored to estimate the age of the stand. In addition to vegetation data, topographic variables including position, slope and aspect will be recorded. In order to compare the community composition of plots quantitatively, cover values for all plant species will be ordinated using standard ordination techniques (e.g., multi-dimensional scaling or detrended correspondence analysis). Ordination scores that summarize compositional differences among plots will be compared using analysis of variance.