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Throughout eastern North America, oaks (Quercus) are a foundational tree species, but are regenerating poorly, particularly on mesic sites. This regeneration failure has spurred development of new management practices that create heterogeneous regeneration conditions that better match oak’s response to disturbances such as surface fire and windthrow. Expanding group shelterwood systems are designed to produce diverse regeneration conditions and have a high edge-to-forest interior ratio, where intermediate light levels may be beneficial for oak regeneration. We present data on early regeneration patterns from a large-scale experiment designed to assess the combined effects of these silvicultural systems and prescribed fire on oak regeneration, ecosystem resilience, and spatial and compositional heterogeneity in the Central Hardwood Region. Using transect-based surveys, we investigated the spatial …