Dominic Hopp

We analysed a semi-dry basiphilous grassland near Bayreuth, Upper Franconia, Germany with nested-plot sampling on areas from 0.0001 to 100 m2. The stand clearly belongs to the order Brachypodietalia pinnati of the class Festuco-Brometea. Within this order, the affinity to the subatlantic alliance Bromion erecti was higher than to the subcontinental CirsioBrachypodion pinnati, while the assignment to any of the current Bromion erecti associations remained unclear due to a lack of an up-to-date syntaxonomic revision of the dry grasslands in Germany. The species richness for the different grain sizes was always above those for Brachypodietalia pinnati communities in NE Germany, but below the extremely rich stands in the White Carpathians or Transylvania. The species-area relationships also had a very low slope (e.g. z = 0.18 for all species combined), pointing to an unusually high homogeneity of the stand or rather a limited regional species pool. The richness values in Bayreuth at sma...