Due to rising societal demands for bio-based building materials and wood-derived energy sources, and climate change leading to more severe droughts and tree mortality, forests canopies are expected to become more open across Europe. This increase in canopy openness will not only affect plant growth and competition processes within the understorey of these forests, but is also expected to trigger understorey responses to other global-change drivers, such as nitrogen deposition, leading to community reordering, potential losses of biodiversity and changes in ecosystem functioning. Past studies have already confirmed this trend in undisturbed forest stands, and found that especially small-ranged species decrease in abundance as a response to increased light availability and nitrogen deposition. The expectation that these dynamics may be exacerbated in managed forests remains to be studied. This project aims to increase our understanding of understorey dynamics in managed forest stands and how forest management can affect understorey responses to global change, focussing specifically on nitrogen deposition effects. To do so, we will study understorey communities in managed forest stands and thinning experiments across Europe and will setup a nitrogen x light exposure mesocosm experiment. Through a scenario analysis, we finally aim to synthesise the project’s findings by simulating effects of future forest management and nitrogen deposition on understorey communities.