Native and introduced Australian grass (Poaceae) records

Cleaned and filtered Australian grass (Poaceae) occurrence records from the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), downloaded 3 January 2020. The data file is in an R format (.RDS file). This can be converted and saved into a .csv file in R. I also assigned species photosynthetic pathway (either C3 or C4 photosynthesis) to each species in the data set.

I converted the cleaned record into species richness (the number of unique species in 100 x 100 km areas across Australia). I tied native and introduced C3 and C4 grass species richness to key environmental variables to build species distribution models. I expected native and introduced grasses to have similar responses to environmental gradients meaning native species richness patterns could provide a template for potential introduced species richness.

These records could be used for other SDM contexts (single-species or within States or Territories). Or for statistical analyses on the phylogenetic (species, generic) composition of grass records in Australia. The location tags on the records, however, provide use for assessing the geographic distribution of the records/species across Australia at different spatial scales and extents and with coupling to environmental data, as I did for these records. Nonnative = introduced (i.e. not native to Australia).