Abstract. In Central Europe forests, natural habitat heterogeneity, which commonly results from dynamics of canopy gap with soil pits and mounds formation, is to a large extent replaced by anthropogenic disturbances. Vascular plants and bryophytes can profit from anthropogenic habitats occurrence in different ways. Our goal was to study the difference between the reaction of these two taxonomic groups on the occurrence of the old ditches in managed forests. We found that the presence of ditches provides habitats for vascular plants as well as microhabitats for bryophytes and leads to enriching the forest flora within both of these groups. On average the number of species occurring in ditches in comparison to forest interior sites was about 97% higher in case of vascular plants and 45% higher in case of bryophytes. The bryophytes were characterized by the bigger dissimilarity of the species composition between the plots in the ditches and in forest interior. The role of the ditches differed between coniferous, mixed and deciduous forest types. In addition, in sites where a significant rise in vascular species richness was noted, bryophytes species enrichment was significantly less than that recorded for the vascular plants.
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