Distribution, drivers, and restoration priorities of plant invasions in India

Biological invasions threaten biodiversity and human wellbeing, with developing tropical countries being more vulnerable. Despite the urgency to reduce impacts of invasions, management interventions are constrained by unavailability of timely information on invasive species occurrence, potential drivers, and restoration priorities. Generating this information at biogeographic scales can be costly, unless integrated with multi-objective biodiversity monitoring. Invasive plant monitoring is integrated with India’s national-scale tiger population assessment, wherein natural areas are sampled at 25 km2 scale to inventory plants. In 2018, a total of 158,979 plots were sampled covering ~358,550 km2. We used 206,393 locations of high concern invasive plants to model their distribution using socio-ecological covariates and identify potential drivers of invasions. Considering the invasion magnitude and financial constraints in management, we further identified priority restorations sites at nati..., All the neccesary methods are provided in the paper., , \# Dataset title: Distribution\, drivers\, and restoration priorities of
plant invasions in India

\#\# Description of the data and file structure

The dataset has two files:

1. Presence.xls: This is a spreadsheet with 34879 records of 11
invasive plants across India, at 25 km2. Every column represent an
invasive species. The column header abbreviations are:

Unique ID: aa Ageratina adenophora, ac Ageratum conyzoides, co
Chromolaena odorata, hy Mesosphaerum suaveolens, lc Lantana camara, mm
Mimosa diplotricha, mi Mikania micrantha, ph Parthenium hysterophorus, pj
Prosopis juliflora, st Senna tora, and xs Xanthium strumarium.

2. priority1.shp: This is a shapefile representing restoration priority
grids of 25 km2. Every grid is ranked 1, 2 or 3, representing the
priority ranks, as discussed in the paper. All necessary details
pertaining methods and meanings of the priority ranks are available in
the paper. The grid is georeferenced, with WGS 1984 Lambert Conforma...