The trend in the number of species of vascular plants along the moisture gradient was unimodal with the optimum skewed towards lower moisture values. This response was not caused by an edge effect alone. The correlations between species richness and productivity (positive) and soil calcium (negative) differed from most of those reported in the literature, which suggests that the observed relationship between species richness and moisture was probably not greatly confounded by these factors. Species richness correlated negatively and the percentage of endangered species positively with the N:P biomass ratio, which is in accordance with other published results, but their correlations with moisture were stronger. For bryophytes, species richness linearly decreased towards the dry plots and did not correlate with any of the nutrients measured.