Forest understory plant communities in the eastern United States are often diverse and are potentially sensitive to changes in climate and atmospheric inputs of nitrogen caused by air pollution. In recent years, empirical and processed-based mathematical models have been developed to investigate such changes in plant communities. A robust set of understory vegetation response functions (US-PROPS v2) has been developed based on observations of forest understory and grassland plant species presence/absence and associated abiotic characteristics derived from spatial datasets. Improvements to the US-PROPS model, relative to version 1, were mostly focused on inclusion of additional input data, development of custom species-level input datasets, and implementation of methods to address uncertainty. The US-PROPS v2 models have been used to evaluate the potential impacts of atmospheric nitrogen (N) and sulfur (S) deposition, and climate change on forest ecosystems at three forested sites located in New Hampshire, Virginia, and Tennessee in the eastern United States. Species-level N and S critical loads (CLs) were determined under ambient deposition at all three modeled sites. The lowest species-level CLs of N deposition at each site were between 2 and 11 kg N/ha/yr. Similarly, the lowest CLs of S deposition, based on the predicted soil pH response, were less than 2 kg S/ha/yr among the three sites. Critical load exceedance was found at all three model sites. The New Hampshire site included the largest percentage of species in exceedance. Simulated warming air temperature typically resulted in lower maximum occurrence probability, which contributed to lower CLs of N and S deposition. The US-PROPS v2 models are currently being used to derive CLs for understory plants within Great Smoky Mountains National Park.