Data: Central European forest-steppe: an ecosystem shaped by climate, topography and disturbances

Supplementary material of Chytrý et al. (2022): Central European forest-steppe: an ecosystem shaped by climate, topography and disturbances. Journal of Biogeography.

Appendix S1. Location of the study sites.

Appendix S2. Characteristics of the study sites.

To explore the interactive effect of macroclimate and topography on the forest-steppe distribution, we selected 108 Central European forest-steppe sites formed on various substrates and under various macroclimates. The key criterium for selection was the presence of relatively well-preserved (near-)natural steppe patches with relict steppe species. Most of the sites were selected based on the empirical knowledge of authors, and some were selected based on geobotanical literature (sources indicated in Appendix S2). Sites obtained from the literature and with no coordinates in the original source were georeferenced with the help of aerial photographs (maps.google.cz) and outdoor maps (mapy.cz; openstreetmap.org). We mostly set the coordinates to the best-developed steppe patch at each site. Some lowland sites with particularly low topographic heterogeneity (especially flatland loess steppes in south-eastern Hungary) were georeferenced with lower precision because the steppe patches were not easily identifiable from aerial photographs.