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

These four data files comprise raw datasets either extracted from published sources (Faulkner et al. 2014; Saccaggi et al. 2021) or downloaded from live databases, namely the Barcode of Life Data System (BOLD) and the Botanical Database of Southern Africa (BODATSA, also known as NewPOSA). Together, they serve as the raw inputs for the workflow developed by Fernandez Winzer et al. (2025), titled “From detection to action—a proposed workflow to ensure first reports of alien species from molecular analyses are acted upon”, published in NeoBiota (https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.104.162310). The datasets included are as follows: BODATSA: Downloaded on 6 May 2025; contains 68,153 records of native and alien plant taxa occurring outside cultivation in South Africa. BOLDlist: Downloaded on 22 November 2023 and filtered to include only records reported from South Africa. The dataset contains 498,735 records in total, of which 56,357 are identified to species level, representing 10,084 species. InspectionsList (Saccaggi et al. 2021): Contains 218 high-risk pest species. WatchList (Faulkner et al. 2014): Contains 400 species of concern. The R scripts implementing the workflow (covering data preparation and cleaning, taxonomic standardisation, and list comparison) are available on GitHub (https://github.com/KatelynFaulkner/bold-first-reports-workflow). The BOLD dataset itself is not included in the repository due to file size constraints.