Kirstin Deutschewitz, Katja Tielbörger, Angela Lausch

• Recently, much ecological research has focused on predicting invasions of alien species in order to prevent potentially negative effects of such invasions. In this study, we utilize novel methods of landscape ecology for testing the hypothesis that increasing structural diversity correlates with an increasing number of alien plant species. Our overall findings support this hypothesis and suggest that in the studied area (RB Dessau, Sachsen Anhalt, Germany), species richness of neophytes is positively correlated with the diversity in land-use types and structures. However, this relationship between structural diversity and species diversity applied for native spe-cies, too. Furthermore, our results support findings of previous studies which show that neophytes occur mainly in artificially or naturally disturbed areas. Our overall findings highlight the use of landscape-scale ecological methods for studying plant distribution patterns.