Occurrence and Environmental Data for Four Invasive Opuntia Species

Sifan Tao's repository provides cleaned occurrence records and environmental data for four invasive Opuntia species (O. dillenii, O. ficus-indica, O. monacantha, O. humifusa). It includes R scripts for species distribution modeling, PCA-env, and MESS analysis. The dataset was last updated on 2026-04-28 and is shared under a CC-BY-4.0 license.

Use Cases

• Modeling species distribution based on cleaned occurrence records and environmental data.
• Conducting Principal Component Analysis of environmental variables (PCA-env) to assess niche similarity.
• Performing Multivariate Environmental Similarity Surface (MESS) analysis to identify novel environments.
• Studying niche dynamics and invasion potential for the four specified Opuntia species.

Strengths

• Data is cleaned, which suggests preprocessing for analysis readiness.
• Includes R scripts for three specific analytical methods (SDM, PCA-env, MESS).
• Covers four distinct invasive Opuntia species for comparative study.
• Shared under a permissive CC-BY-4.0 license for reuse.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• The dataset is small (613.1 KB), indicating a limited scope of records.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Sifan Tao

Collection Method

Likely compiled from field observations or biodiversity databases, then cleaned.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-04-28 09:00:49; freshness should be verified.