Land-use intensity and relatedness to native plants promote exotic plant invasion in a tropical biodiversity hotspot

Exotic plant invasions threaten biodiversity and are costly to farmers. Land use is a major pathway promoting the spread of exotic plant species; however, little is known about the processes underlying the success of exotic plants in tropical agricultural landscapes. Focussing on the heterogeneous smallholder landscapes of north-eastern Madagascar, we studied exotic plants of understorey communities across a land-use intensity gradient from unburned lands (old-growth forests, forest fragments, and forest-derived vanilla agroforests) to burned ones (fallow-derived vanilla agroforests, woody fallows, and herbaceous fallows). 
We quantified the absolute species richness, abundance, and cover of exotic plants across land-use types and their proportional contribution to community richness, abundance, and cover as indicators of exotic plant invasion. We tested for the effects of land-use parameters, namely land-use history, canopy closure, and landscape-level forest cover, on exotic plants. A..., 1) Understorey plant communities across 70 plots with their species names, genus, family, and species origin (native, exotic or unknown origin), number of individuals and species cover per plot, assessed using 8 subplots of 4 m² per plot and then pooled on plot level.
2) Plot characteristics (plot code, land-use history, canopy cover, landscape-scale forest cover).
Methods are described in the paper:
Raveloaritiana, E., Tscharntke, T., Martin, D. A., Wurz, A., Osen, K., Soazafy, M. R., Vorontsova, M. S., Kreft, H., Rakouth, B., & Grass, I. (2024). Land-use intensity and relatedness to native plants promote exotic plant invasion in a tropical biodiversity hotspot. Accepted in Journal of Applied Ecology., , # Data from: Land-use intensity and relatedness to native plants promote exotic plant invasion in a tropical biodiversity hotspot

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbcckb](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbcckb)

## Owners: Estelle Raveloaritiana, Teja Tscharntke, Dominic A. Martin, Annemarie Wurz, Kristina Osen, Marie Rolande Soazafy, Maria S. Vorontsova, Holger Kreft, Bakolimalala Rakouth, Ingo Grass

**Dryad data citation:**

“Raveloaritiana, E., Tscharntke, T., Martin, D. A., Wurz, A., Osen, K., Soazafy, M. R., Vorontsova, M. S., Kreft, H., Rakouth, B., & Grass, I. (2024). Data from: Land-use intensity and relatedness to native plants promote exotic plant invasion in a tropical biodiversity hotspot. *Dryad Dataset.* [https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbcckb”](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.zgmsbcckb”)

## Description of the data and file structure

**Dataset “1-Understorey plant communities data.csv”** contains Understorey plant communities data across 70 plots in north-eastern ...