Alien plant presence dataset from the poin-radius plot surveys in 2010-2015 in Taiwan

This dataset included the 63,086 occurrence records of alien vascular plants from the field survey of 4,879 sampling plots being conducted in 2010-2015 in Taiwan. We made sample plots with radius in 20 meters along the road systems covering Taiwan and documented the presence of all plants in the plots. The distance between two adjacent sampling points was about 2.0-2.5 kilometers. We georeferenced the center of each sampling plot by using a GPS receiver and documented the coordinate in decimal degrees of latitude and longitude with accuracy to 0.00001 as well as the altitude with accuracy to 1 meter. We documented the coordinates only when GPS signal was fixed and the error of horizontal positioning was within 5 meters. The altitude of sampling point ranged from -17 to 3,155 meters. The scientific names of all plants in the dataset were matched and corrected based on the taxonomic data from the GBIF backbone taxonomy and the Catalog of Life by using the scientific name matching service developed by Taiwan Biodiversity Information Facility (http://match.taibif.tw/). We adopted the accepted name as well as retrieved the name of higher taxonomic rank and the taxon rank identified for each occurrence record of alien plant. There were 72 families with 400 species, 18 subspecies, and 9 varieties of alien plants being documented in this dataset.