The movement of plant species across the globe exposes native communities to new species introductions. While introductions are pervasive, two aspects of variability underlie patterns and processes of biological invasions at macroecological scales. First, only a portion of introduced species become invaders capable of substantially impacting ecosystems. Second, species that do become invasive at one location may not be invasive in others; impacts depend on invader abundance and recipient species and conditions. Accounting for these phenomena is essential to accurately understand the patterns of plant invasion and explain the idiosyncratic results reflected in the literature on biological invasions. The lack of community‐level richness and the abundance of data spanning broad scales and environmental conditions have until now hindered our understanding of invasions at a macroecological scale. To address this limitation, we leveraged quantitative surveys of plant communities in the USA and integrated and harmonized nine datasets into the Standardized Plant Community with Introduced Status (SPCIS) database. The database contains 14,056 unique taxa identified within 83,391 sampling units, of which 52.6% have at least one introduced species. The SPCIS database includes comparable information on plant species occurrence, abundance, and native status across the 50 U.S. States and Puerto Rico. SPCIS can be used to answer macro‐scale questions about native plant communities and interactions with invasive plants. There are no copyright restrictions on the data, and we ask the users of this dataset to cite this paper, the respective paper(s) corresponding to the dataset sampling design (all references are provided in Data S1: Metadata S1: Class II‐B‐2), and the references described in Data S1: Metadata S1: Class III‐B‐4 as applicable to the dataset being utilized.
Historical horticultural plant sales influence native and nonnative species assemblages in contemporary ecosystems. Over half of nonnative, invasive plants naturalized in the United States were introduced as ornamentals, and the spatial and temporal patterns of early introduction undoubtedly influence current invasion ecology. While thousands of digitized nursery catalogs documenting these introductions are publicly available, they have not been standardized in a single database. To fill this gap, we obtained the names of all plant taxa (species, subspecies, and varieties) present in the Biodiversity Heritage Library's (BHL) Seed and Nursery Catalog Collection. We then searched the BHL database for these names and downloaded all available records. We combined BHL records with data from an encyclopedia of heirloom ornamental plants to create a single database of historical nursery sales in the US. Each record represents an individual taxon offered for sale at an individual time in a specific nursery's catalog. We standardized records to the current World Flora Online (
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10418031
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Ecology
- Volume:
- 104
- Issue:
- 7
- ISSN:
- 0012-9658
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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