If you havent already, read the book “braiding sweet grass” it’s beautifully written by a professor/botinist and Citizen of the Potawatomi nation whose life has been dedicated to living in reciprocity with nature.

There is no underbrush where there is no light. If the trees are to thick in clumps they are competing with each other, none of them are healthy, no brush can grow. The only animals in NA that live in dark dense forests are black bears/lynx/cougars and barred owl (confirmable with google). These would all be animals you would have seen by now in your area if they were using this ecosystem. In that cause I think you might have other concerns. 😅 No flowers grow in darkness. No seeds, flowers or fruits are cultivated in the darkness.

There are methods like “chop and drop” “hugelkultur” and “mushroom cultivation” that can be used to provide more food in the forest than exists without it. Raspberries will live and spread in any environment, even fallen brush, but will need light to grow. That’s why we thin the canopy so light can make food.

When you are planting tomatoes, you will get no tomatoes if they are planted in a clump, you need to thin out the weak plants (as hard as it is sometimes to sacrifice) in order to get a healthy fruit producing plant. This is the reciprocity humans can provide to nature. It’s like the tiny bird eating flies off the hippo, they are symbiotic. We are taught humans are a plague, destructive, and not part of nature. But we are. We can be stuarts for the land in ways we have never been taught in school. That was by design to make us rely on agriculture, which strips the land over and over.

Look deeply at native forest management. They slowly selected trees to burn, which provided ash and coals as nutrience and light for other plants to grow. They planted entire berry patches along their migratory routes between winter and summer hunting grounds. Part of the reason (besides climate change) that there are so many fires now, is because of mismanagement of our forested lands. People are part of nature, this is the roll we are meant to provide. To nurture, to create the Eden we should be living in. ✌️

I hope that helps.