Between-year weather differences and long-term environmental trends both contribute to observed vegetation changes in a plot resurvey study.

Repeated surveys of vegetation plots offer a viable tool to detect fine-scale responses of vegetation to environmental changes. In this study, our aim was to explore how the species composition and species richness of dry grasslands changed over a period of 17 years, how these changes relate to environmental changes and how the presence of spring ephemerals, which may react to short-term weather fluctuations rather than long-term climatic trends, may influence the results. A total of 95 plots was surveyed in 2005 and resurveyed in 2022 in dry grasslands of the Kiskunság Sand Ridge (Hungary, Eastern Central Europe), where there has been a significant increase in mean annual temperature during the last decades, while no trends in precipitation can be identified.