CONTEXT: Historical land use is thought to have influenced plant community diversity, composition and function through the local persistence of taxa that reflect ecological conditions of the past. OBJECTIVES: We tested for the effects of historical land use on contemporary plant species richness, composition, and ecological preferences in the grassland vegetation of Central Europe. METHODS: We analyzed 6975 vegetation plots sampled between 1946 and 2021 in dry, mesic, and wet grasslands in the borderland between Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. Using 1819-1853 military maps, we assigned each plot to a historical land-use category (arable land, forest, grassland, settlement, permanent crop, and water body). We modeled the response of species richness, composition, and plant ecological preferences to the historical land use including contemporary covariates. RESULTS: Nineteenth-century land use explained little overall variation in species richness and composition, whereas more variation was explained by contemporary environmental conditions. However, we found that ecological preferences of some species were associated with specific historical land uses. Specifically, species more frequently occurring in historically forested grasslands showed lower light and disturbance frequency indicator values, while those associated with former settlements displayed higher disturbance severity indicator values. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that signatures of specific land-use conversions, including the restoration of grasslands in human-impacted areas, may still be detectable in grasslands even 200 years into the future. However, while local historical land use influences the occurrence of some species based on their ecological preferences, these effects do not significantly influence community species richness and total composition. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10980-024-02016-6.

Department of Biology University of Graz Graz Austria

Department of Botany and Zoology Faculty of Science Masaryk University Brno Czech Republic

Department of Landscape Ecology Silva Tarouca Research Institute for Landscape and Ornamental Gardening Brno Czech Republic

Department of Spatial Sciences Faculty of Environmental Sciences Czech University of Life Sciences Prague Kamýcká 129 165 00 Praha Suchdol Czech Republic

Division of Biodiversity Dynamics and Conservation Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research University Vienna Vienna Austria

Division of BioInvasions Global Change and Macroecology Department of Botany and Biodiversity Research University of Vienna Vienna Austria

Plant Science and Biodiversity Center Slovak Academy of Sciences Bratislava Slovakia

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