InvaCost: References and description of economic cost estimates associated with biological invasions worldwide.

CAUTION: InvaCost is currently being analysed by a network of international collaborators in the frame of the InvaCost project (https://www.biodiversitydynamics.fr/invacost-workshop/). Interested users may contact the authors if they wish to learn more about or contribute to these current efforts. Users are in no way prevented from performing their own independent analyses and collaboration with this network is not required. Nonetheless, users and contributors are encouraged to contact the authors before using the database, as the information contained may not be directly implementable for specific analyses.<br> InvaCost ('InvaCost_database' file) is the most up-to-date, comprehensive, harmonised and robust data compilation and description of economic cost estimates associated with invasive species worldwide. Currently, this database contains 2419 cost estimates described by 46 variables. InvaCost has been constructed to provide a contemporary and freely available repository of monetary impacts that can be relevant for both research and evidence-based policy making issues. All the methodological details and tools used to build and populate this living and publicly available database are available at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-00586-z. All scientific peer-reviewed articles and grey literature (along with their bibliographic details and/or links) collected and examined for collating and describing these cost data are also provided in the 'InvaCost_references' file (see the related published paper abovementioned for specific details). InvaCost is intended to be regularly updated with contributions from both authors and future users in order to improve it both quantitatively (by new cost information) and qualitatively (if errors are identified). Any reader or user can propose to update InvaCost by contacting our e-mail address ([e-mail]). Each updated version of InvaCost will be stored in the same repository as the original version, with a unique version number. For this purpose, we consider the original version of InvaCost publicly released on (date of publication) as ‘InvaCost_1.0’. The further updated versions will be named using the order of this numbering (e.g., ‘InvaCost_1.1’, InvaCost_1.2’) with all information on changes made that will be provided in a dedicated file called ‘Updates_Changes.xlsx’. We will consider ‘InvaCost_2.0’ only when the structure of the database will change.<br>IMPORTANT: In the frame of our general InvaCost project, we have now generated two other databases on the economic costs of invasions worldwide: one based on the remaining references collected (but not yet processed when constructing the original InvaCost database) that is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12928145.v1; and the other one based on documents available on languages other than English, which is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.12928136.