Herbs and Clearcutting: Reply to Elliot and Loftis and Steinbeck

Duffy and Meier (1992) asked if the herbaceous understory communities in the southern Appalachians differed between primary and secondary forest sites and if such differences decrease in time as forests recover from clearcutting. Steinbeck claims that our afticle is "little more than opinion masquerading as science." He is of course entitled to his opinion and I appreciate his willingness to express his views openly. Elliott and Loftis express "serious concern" that "major methodological flaws" exist in our work. I address their concerns below. Elliot and Loftis claim that choice of plot size and number of plots are critical to any study of vegetation diversity. They invoke a hypothetical 50% reduction in plant density between two plant populations to show how our sampling might be biased, but such a 50% reduction in population between primary and secondary herbaceous communities would prove the point of our paper. Elliott and Loftis further suggest that species richness may vary greatly between plots. For this to affect our results, however, there would have to be much more difference between plots within secondgrowth than within primary forest. For example, to use their model and our data, a second-growth forest with only 6.6 species per plot and