3 species with a neutral (without a relationship, named ‘None’) response were omitted as not preferring any NLC. a-h, Response curves of plant species to NLC. i-l, Summary statistics of preferred NLCs. a, Summary of all 1 122 native plants responding to NLC (with percentages in parentheses). b-d, Response curves of species with decreasing (each magenta line indicates one species) (b), unimodal (each blue line indicates one species) (c) and increasing (each green line indicates one species) (d) relations with NLC. The dark black line is the average response curve of each species group. The yellow line indicates the standardized proportion of grids with different NLC in the Netherlands. Both the occurrence probability and the standardized proportion (percentage) range from 0% to 100% and are indicated by the y axis. e-h, Species with unimodal shapes were split into four groups based on their preferred NLCs (e, species with preferred NLCs ranging from 0–25%; f, species with preferred NLCs ranging from 25–50%; g, species with preferred NLCs ranging from 50–75%; h, species with preferred NLCs ranging from 75–100%). i-j, Statistics of preferred NLCs of all 1 122 native plant species (i, summary of 1 122 plant species’ preferred NLCs; j, percentage of species (in brackets) in different preferred NLC range groups, i.e. 0%, 0–25%, 25–50%, 50–75%, 75–100% and 100%). k-l, Statistics of preferred NLCs of species with unimodal shapes (k, summary of plant species’ preferred NLCs; l, histogram of preferred NLCs of plant species with unimodal relations with NLC). All mean values are means ± SE.