Constructing a database of alien plants in the Himalayas to test patterns structuring diversity

Differences in the number of alien plant species in different locations may reflect climatic and other controls that similarly affect native species and/or propagule pressure accompanied by delayed spread from the point of introduction. We set out to examine these alternatives for Himalayan plants, in a phylogenetic framework. We build a database of alien plant distributions for the Himalayas. Focusing on the well-documented regions of Jammu & Kashmir (west) and Bhutan (east) we compare alien and native species for (1) richness patterns, (2) the degree of phylogenetic clustering, (3) the extent to which species-poor regions are subsets of species-rich regions and (4) continental and climatic affinities/source. We document 1470 alien species (at least 600 naturalised), which comprise ~14% of the vascular plants known from the Himalayas. Alien plant species with tropical affinities decline in richness with elevation and species at high elevations form a subset of those at lower elevat..., , , # Constructing a database of alien plants in the Himalayas to test patterns structuring diversity

## Description of the dataset

The dataset contains two files.

File-1 (word file) contains a list of 31 regional floras and 93 research articles which were reviewed comprehensively for information on the distribution and elevational ranges of all alien plant species reported from the Himalayas.

File-2 (Excel file) contains details of all the alien species.

To harmonise taxonomy across sources, we assessed all species names against the updated list of botanical names available from www.worldfloraonline.org (World Flora Online) and resolved every taxon to species level. Any species whose native distribution extends into the Himalayan region is considered as a native, whereas a species whose native range is elsewhere is considered as alien. Native and alien distributional ranges of all species were validated from various online sources including the Invasive Species Compendium (www.cabi.or...