Before determining the influence of passive restoration on cover of vascular plants and biocrusts, we wanted to establish the degree to which community composition differed amongst locations and determine which locations had similar plant communities. Plant community identities were defined using cluster analysis with Ward's method as the group linkage method on each combination of exclosure and location, whether the survey location was inside or outside of the respective exclosure. This approach uses both cover **data** of vascular plants as well as biocrusts. Identified groups were tested for statistical differences with multi-response permutation procedure. Euclidean distance was used as the distance measure in both analyses.