SPCIS: Standardized Plant Community with Introduced Status Database

Abstract

The movement of plant species across the globe exposes native communities to new species introductions. While introductions are pervasive, two aspects of variability underlie patterns and processes of biological invasions at macroecological scales. First, only a portion of introduced species become invaders capable of substantially impacting ecosystems. Second, species that do become invasive at one location may not be invasive in others; impacts depend on invader abundance and recipient species and conditions. Accounting for these phenomena is essential to accurately understand patterns of plant invasion and explain the idiosyncratic results reflected in the literature on biological invasions. The lack of community-level richness and abundance data spanning broad scales and environmental conditions has until now hindered our understanding of invasions at a macroecological scale. To address this limitation, we leveraged quantitative surveys of plant communities in the United States and integrated and harmonized nine datasets into the Standardized Plant Community with Introduced Status (SPCIS) database. The database contains 14,056 unique taxa identified within 83,391 sampling units, of which 52.6% have at least one introduced species. The SPCIS database includes comparable information of plant species occurrence, abundance and native status across the 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico. SPCIS can be used to answer macro-scale questions about native plant communities and interactions with invasive plants.