From detection to action—a proposed workflow to ensure first reports of alien species from molecular analyses are acted upon

These four data files are raw datasets either extracted from published papers (Faulkner et al. 2014; Saccaggi et al. 2021) or downloaded from live databases [The Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD; www.barcodinglife.org) and the Botanical Database of Southern Africa (BODATSA, also known as NewPOSA; http://posa.sanbi.org/)]. They serve as the raw inputs for the workflow developed by Fernandez Winzer et al., titled “From detection to action—a proposed workflow to ensure first reports of alien species from molecular analyses are acted upon”, which is currently under review. The journal and citation details will be updated, or an updated Zenodo record created, once the paper is formally accepted. WatchList: Faulkner et al. (2014): contains 400 species. InspectionsList: Saccaggi et al. (2021): contains 218 high-risk pest species. BODATSA: downloaded on 6 May 2025, contains 68,153 records of native and alien plants outside cultivation. BOLDlist: downloaded on 22 November 2023, filtered for records present only in South Africa. It contains 498,735 records in total, of which 56,357 records are identified to species level, representing 10,084 species. The R scripts for the workflow, covering data preparation and cleaning, taxonomic standardisation, and list comparison, are available on GitHub: https://github.com/KatelynFaulkner/bold-first-reports-workflow. Note that the BOLD data file is too large to be included in the GitHub repository.