We further distinguished between the covers of vascular plants and mosses, as mosses considerably contribute to the greenness of sparsely vegetated terrain (Karnieli et al. 2002, 1996). Finally, the plot vegetation cover was computed from the mean of the embedded subplot values calculated before. Altogether, 5 plots were detected as outliers and were removed from further analysis. The remaining 93 plots were then grouped into 4 classes of degradation intensity, based on their percentage of vegetation cover (Table 1), a classification comparable to those used in other studies. We used the Wilcoxon rank sum test with Bonferroni correction method for post-hoc class comparisons. All analyses were performed using the R Project statistical computing software (R Core Team 2014)