County-Level Distribution Records for Alien Invasive Plants in China

73,469 distribution records detail the presence of 400 alien invasive plant species across 2,684 administrative counties in China, covering 92.5% of the country's counties. Yingbo Yang compiled this database by integrating herbarium records, literature, and GBIF data, with records spanning from 1607 to 2023. It provides 2.58 times more distribution records than global repositories like GBIF and includes the earliest introduction dates for each species.

Use Cases

• Modeling species invasion risk across Chinese counties using species presence records and earliest introduction dates.
• Analyzing temporal trends in plant introductions over a 400-year period using the record date range from 1607 to 2023.
• Mapping the geographic spread of specific alien invasive plant species using the county-level georeferenced distribution data.
• Comparing the completeness of this database against global repositories by leveraging the reported 2.58x increase in distribution records.

Strengths

• Contains 73,469 rigorously quality-controlled distribution records.
• Covers 400 alien invasive plant species across 2,684 counties (92.5% of China's total).
• Temporal range spans over 400 years, from 1607 to 2023.
• Provides 2.58 times more distribution records than global repositories like GBIF.

Limitations

• The dataset is small at 2.3 MB, limiting the complexity of possible analyses.
• Unknown row count and lack of column details prevent assessment of feature richness and structure.
• Spatial resolution is limited to the county level, not finer-grained coordinates.

Provenance

Source

Integrated from China's online herbarium, biodiversity databases, flora, published literature, and GBIF.

Collection Method

Compilation and integration of 73,469 records from multiple sources, plus 173,396 georeferenced records from GBIF.

Time Range

1607 to 2023

Freshness

Updated in April 2026.

Geography

China, at the county administrative level.