Thin lines between native and invasive aquatic plants are common, posing challenges for response efforts

Lines separating native and invasive plant species can be thin due to close relatedness, obscured by cryptic invasions, or breached by hybridization. Past work suggests these phenomena are especially prevalent in aquatic systems. This could arise from strong filters imposed by aquatic environments magnifying the importance of “preadaptation”—non-native species succeeding where closely related native species occur due to shared traits. If so, there should be stronger signals of preadaptation in aquatic than terrestrial plant invasions, with implications for management. I tested for a stronger influence of preadaptation in aquatic than terrestrial invasions by comparing the relatedness of invasive and native species in aquatic vs. terrestrial flora of the Midwestern USA using herbarium records and taxonomic and phylogenetic analyses. I predicted that aquatic species would constitute an evolutionarily distinct subset of plants; aquatic invaders would be more closely related, taxonomically ..., , , # Thin lines between native and invasive aquatic plants are common, posing challenges for response efforts

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j1030](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.7h44j1030)

Data, consisting of geographic species lists and a phylogeny, were derived from existing sources and adapted for this study. All sources of data are cited both within the associated manuscript and in the README. The data have been processed in R, and all processed data and R code necessary to reproduce the analyses are included with this submission.

The dataset includes:

**data/processed_data/aq_terr.spp.rds:** A list of aquatic and terrestrial plant species for the Midwestern study region. This list includes both invasive and native species. Identities of invasive species were assembled from priority lists of the Minnesota Aquatic Invasive Species Research Center (MAISRC 2022), the Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center (Morey & Venette 2021), and the Invasive Plants Associat...