Global plant invaders: a compendium of invasive plant taxa documented by the peer‐reviewed literature

Stopping invasive species early, before they are introduced or before they have a chance to spread, is essential for effective invasive species management. With new plants introduced constantly through global trade and shifting their ranges due to climate change, proactive action to prevent invasions is more important than ever. But, before we can prevent invasions through policy, monitoring, and management, we need to know the identity of which species are invasive. Existing lists of invasive plants vary across political and jurisdictional boundaries, often rely on inconsistent knowledge of local experts, and may conflate nonnative with invasive. Here, we reviewed papers published from 1959 to 2020 to create a single consistently derived list of known invasive plants. We searched the Web of Science core collection for “articles” containing the keywords “invasi*” and “plant” within the categories “Ecology,” “Environmental Sciences,” “Biodiversity Conservation,” and “Plant Sciences.” We also reviewed papers cited in reviews of invasive plants (see Metadata S1, Class II, Section B). We read titles and abstracts to identify papers that focused on nonnative and invasive vascular plants and included in the database any nonnative plant taxon either explicitly termed invasive in the paper or implicitly defined as invasive through a description of abundance, spread and/or impact. For 2017–2020, we included only papers that described multiple invasive plants, which are much more likely to uncover novel taxa. For each paper, we retained the reported invasive taxon name, text defining invasiveness, bibliographic information, and the country or countries in the invaded range where the study took place. We used Catalogue of Life and the Plant Taxonomic Name Resolution Source to resolve the taxonomy of the invasive taxa and compiled a list of unique invasive plants described in one or more scientific papers. We extracted data from 5,893 papers and identified 3,008 unique taxa, including 2,842 species, 96 subspecies, 29 varieties, and 41 hybrids. Of these, 2,981 taxa were resolved, while 27 were unresolved. 42% of the total unique taxa were studied once in the database. This database provides a consistent, global assessment of nonnative, invasive plant taxa. We release these data into the public domain under a Creative Commons Zero license waiver (https://creativecommons.org/share‐your‐work/public‐domain/cc0/). Individuals who use these data for publication may cite this data paper.