Inventory of cultivated alien plants in China

Background

Most naturalized plants are escapees from cultivation. Inventories of cultivated introduced species thus offer unique, still underutilized, opportunities to assess naturalization drivers of introduced plants. We collected a comprehensive inventory of 13,718 introduced species cultivated in China’s botanical gardens with information associated with functional traits (i.e. life form, propagation mode and maximum height), propagule pressure (i.e. number of botanical gardens, number of provinces where planted, availability in online nursery catalogue and economic use), environmental niche (i.e. continent of origin, number of regions the species is native to and climatic suitability) and introduction history (i.e. residence time). .

This dataset was published for the paper titled “Naturalization of alien plants is driven by life-form-dependent cultivation biases”, by Bi-Cheng Dong, Qiang Yang, Nicole L. Kinlock, Robin Pouteau, Petr Pyšek, Patrick Weigelt, Fei-Hai Yu, and Mark van Kleunen, published in Diversity and Distributions. Please see the manuscript itself and the Supporting Information for additional details.

Metadata for the main dataset

TPL Name: name of taxon, standardized using The Plant List (TPL);
Authority: Authority of the standardized names, provided by TPL;
Nat. Status: has the taxon naturalized in China? (1 = naturalized, 0 = non-naturalized);
No. Bot. Garden: the number of botanical gardens in which the taxon was cultivated;
No. Prov.: the number of provinces in which the taxon was cultivated;
Online Avail.: has the taxon been for sale in Alibaba? (1 = yes, 0 = no).;
No. Eco. Use: the number of economic-use categories that the taxon had;
Clim. Suit.: the mean climatic suitability of the taxon across China (x1000), estimated by SDMs;
Native Range: the number of TDWG level-3 regions in which the taxon is considered native;
First Record Year: the year of first record in the wild for the taxon with specimens in the Chinese Virtual Herbarium;
Life Form: the life form of the taxon, categorized as short-lived herbaceous (1), long-lived herbaceous (2), or woody (3);
Propagation: the propagation mode that the taxon had, categorized as seed (1), vegetative (2), or both (3);
Max. Height: max. height of the taxon, in meters

Data table

How to cite

Dong, B.-C., Yang, Q., Kinlock, N. L., Pouteau, R., Pyšek, P., Weigelt, P., Yu, F.-H., & van Kleunen, M. (2024). Naturalization of introduced plants is driven by life-form-dependent cultivation biases. Diversity and Distributions, 30, 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.13788

Dong, Bi-Cheng et al. (2023). Naturalization of introduced plants is driven by life-form-dependent cultivation biases [Dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.k6djh9wd3