Data from: Botany is the root and the future of invasion biology

This dataset was used to create Figure 1 within the linked On the Nature
of Things article. The article describes how botanists have historically
contributed to the field of invasion biology and why botanists should be
an important contributor in the coming years. To make this point, we
compared the relative frequencies of google ngrams containing the words
'invasive species', 'invasive plants', or the sum of
frequencies from several different animal taxa including: ‘invasive
insects’, ‘invasive animals’, ‘invasive fish’, ‘invasive birds’, ‘invasive
amphibians’, and ‘invasive mammals’ from 1958-2019. We also evaluated
similar searches that used the words 'exotic',
'foreign' or 'weed' in the place of
'invasive'. This dataset contains the results of these searches
with each row representing a separate year and with each column
representing a separate search term. Our findings from this dataset
support our conclusion that plants have been important model systems in
invasion biology as they are the most highly cited the taxonomic group in
our search. Results were similar when using 'exotic',
'foreign', but were an order of magnitude higher when using
'weed' as this term is widely used in the public vernacular
outside of the research community. This dataset may be of use to anyone
interested in the history of invasion biology.