GloNAF -
The Global Naturalized Alien Flora’s database
The Global Naturalized Alien Flora project is a living database of naturalized alien plant species that has became a synonym for many related projects dealing with all kinds of scientific and policy relevant questions and studies about alien species (as well as other taxa) and related data.
GloNAF started out in 2011 as a vision to overcome heterogenous and incomplete data on alien plant species richness worldwide and go beyond the pure numbers per region, by focusing also on species identities. Over three years, the GloNAF core team mobilized data on the occurrence of naturalized plant species from checklists, regional inventories as well as unpublished data held by colleagues and experts in the field, subsequently standardizing the taxonomy to get a first global inventory – GloNAF version 1.1 was born! This release was followed by a seminal paper that on 19 August 2015, for the first time, presented robust global patterns of naturalized alien plant species distribution and historical dynamics (van Kleunen et al. 2015). Since then, GloNAF has developed into the most comprehensive source of information on naturalized alien plants worldwide, currently covering around 16,000 taxa across over 1,300 regions (e.g., countries, provinces, states, islands) of the world (see figure bellow). The latest version of the GloNAF database is currently available in t
Studies using the GloNAF database have significantly advanced our understanding of global plant invasions, disentangling macroecological (van Kleunen et al. 2015, Pyšek et al. 2017, Essl et al. 2019, Fristoe et al. 2021, Yang et al. 2021) and macroevolutionary (Lenzner et al. 2021, Bach et al. 2022, Pyšek et al. 2023, Guo et al. 2024) patterns and their drivers (Dawson et al. 2017, van Kleunen et al. 2020, Lenzner et al. 2022, Omer et al. 2022).
GloNAF has also significantly contributed to moving the field towards more standardized data (also across other taxonomic groups), including the development of standardized, reproducible workflows for data integration and alien status assessments (e.g., Seebens et al. 2020, Arlé et al. 2021, Seebens and Kaplan 2022) or by inspiring new publication formats like the “Alien Floras and Faunas” section in the Journal “Biological Invasions” that encourage researchers to publish their regional alien species checklists in a standardized format (Pyšek et al. 2018).
Finally, GloNAF has contributed to shaping our understanding of future trends in alien plant invasions (Seebens et al. 2021, Omer et al. 2024) and is a crucial data source in science-policy work, for example in the status quo assessment of plant invasions in the IPBES Invasive Alien Species Assessment.
Given the dynamic nature of biological invasions, GloNAF is maintained as a living database that is regularly updated. If you have data that fill in gaps or that update the records please do reach out. All information is available on the webpage: https://glonaf.org.
Figure left. Naturalized alien taxa richness of non-overlapping (n=984) regions in GloNAF 2.0. Note that the non-overlapping regions without reported naturalized taxa may be included in or overlapping with regions that have such data but are not shown here.
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