GRACE Resurvey of Central European Grassland Vegetation to study the Impacts of Country-Level Landscape Dynamics on Biodiversity

Verena Haring, Gabriele Midolo, Petr Keil , Milan Chytrý, Franz Essl, Emma Shih Mendez, Elisa Padulosi, Dariia Borovyk , Friederike Wölke, Veronika Kalusová, Zdenka Preislerová, Barbora Chmelová, Eliška Jagošová, Georg Hörmann, Helena Schwaiger, Julian Pleyer, Marie Vymazalová, Matouš Marek, Nicolas Türk, Vojtěch Sobotka, Adam Thomas Clark

Grasslands harbor high species diversity and are strongly influenced by local management and land-use histories. In countries of Central Europe, these ecosystems were severely impacted by different agricultural policies on both sides of the former Iron Curtain in the second half of the 20th century,, reshaping grassland extent and habitat quality. These land-use changes turned border regions into a natural experiment for studying the impacts of landscape structure and management on grassland plant communities. Here, we provide 401 historical vegetation plots, each paired with its recent resurvey, along the border region between Austria, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The dataset, collected as part of the GRACE project (GRAssland Communities Experiment), spans 95 years, with the first surveys conducted between 1930 and 2020 and resurveys conducted between 2024 and 2025. The resurvey design was structured to balance representation across both countries and to capture the macroclimatic gradient of the region. The resulting vegetation-plot dataset (available at https://github.com/adamtclark/GRACE_resurveydata to be populated after review) provides valuable insights into the development of initially similar grassland communities impacted by divergent country-level landscape dynamics in Central Europe since the mid-20th century.