Abstract
The botanical composition is relevant to the forage quality of permanent meadows, as species di€er
from each other in their quality characteristics. A complete and detailed description of the botanical
composition and the classication into a meadow type (MT) is time-consuming and requires advanced
botanical skills. A quicker and easier method that is o‚en used for the estimation of the forage quality is to
assign the plant stand to one of the plant stand types (PT) ‘rich in grasses’, ‘balanced’, ‘rich in forbs’ or ‘rich
in legumes’ based on the yield proportion of grasses, forbs and legumes. A large data set of about 6,000
forage samples obtained by sequential sampling at 202 environments in South Tyrol (Italy), describing
the changes in forage quality along the phenological development starting from stem elongation, was
used to investigate the e€ect of both MT and PT on 16 parameters of forage quality. Starting from a
baseline model including design e€ects and growing degree days as a covariate, the improvement of the
prediction accuracy of the model due to MT and PT was described by a ve-fold cross-validation of
stepwise forward-developed mixed models. PT contributed to improve the prediction accuracy of most
of the investigated quality parameters and for 10 parameters was taken rst into the model. MT was
relevant as well for some of the parameters, but it played a less consistent role.