Key message: We provided long-term stand and canopy structural data from permanent monitoring plots representative of some most diffuse temperate and Mediterranean forests, under different coppice management regimes. Periodic inventories were performed in the surveyed plots since the 1970s. Annual litterfall production and its partitioning (leaf, woody, reproductive parts) and optical canopy measurements using the LAI-2000 Plant Canopy Analyzer were performed every year in fully equipped plots since the 1990s. These data can be used for evaluating the influence of coppice management in the stand and canopy structure, the parametrization of radiative transfer models that require accurate ground truth data, and the calibration of high to medium resolution remotely sensed data. Dataset access is at https://doi.org/10.17632/z8zm3ytkcx.2. Associated metadata is available at https://agroenvgeo.data.inra.fr/geonetwork/srv/eng/catalog.search#/metadata/2bd2d77f-3cf8-43da-b1b5-9f8196dc017f . © 2019, INRA and Springer-Verlag France SAS, part of Springer Nature.