Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF) : Open access data to support research on understanding global plant invasions

Abstract

This dataset is a snapshot of the Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF) database, version 2.02. GloNAF is a continuously updated, curated compilation of alien naturalized vascular plant inventories for geographic regions from around the world. The dataset has 16,429 unique taxa reported as naturalized or invasive and covers 1,343 regions (including 427 islands) from 336 data sources. For each region, the status (invasive, naturalized) is provided as listed in the original source. We provide the scientific names included with the original data source, and the matching accepted name or synonym of the taxon as given in the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) Version 12. In addition, we provide an ESRI shapefile of polygons for each region. We also provide several variables that can be used to filter the data according to quality and completeness of alien taxon lists, which vary among the combinations of regions and data sources. The 'glonaf_flora2.csv' file lists the IDs ('taxon_wcvp_id') of all naturalized taxa contained in GloNAF and the regions they occur in. The 'glonaf_taxon_wcvp.csv' lists the original taxon names provided in the source data along with the corresponding accepted taxon name from the WCVP (version 12) for all alien taxa in GloNAF, regardless of their naturalization status. To link taxon names with naturalization records, join the 'id' column of the 'glonaf_taxon_wcvp.csv' file to the 'taxon_wcvp_id' column in 'glonaf_flora2.csv' . Additional information regarding the original source of the data ('glonaf_reference.csv'), specific attributes of the taxon lists ('glonaf_list.csv') and the region ('glonaf_region.csv') can also be joined similarly to 'glonaf_flora2.csv '. This is a snapshot of the GloNAF database last updated on February 24, 2025. It contains the global distribution of naturalized and invasive vascular plants. This version contains the same plant taxa by region and taxonomic names that were used in version 2.02. This version contains mostly structural updates and is consistent with Davis et.al (2025). The updates are as follows:

missing LAT/LON values for centroids of GloNAF Regions were added to shapefiles. The region boundary for Uzbekistan was added to the 'glonaf_2024_nol' shapefile. Extraneous data columns were removed from 'glonaf_list'. Regions that were placeholders and did not contain any naturalized species were removed from 'glonaf_region'. All files that were previously provided as 'XLSX' format are now provided as 'CSV' with UTF-8 encoding.