Invasive Species

GIATAR: Global Invasive and Alien Traits and Records Dataset

Consolidated dataset with dated presence records for 46,666 invasive and alien taxa across 249 countries, with standardised biological information on pests.

Size
42.7 MB
Format
ZIP
License
CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0
Access
Open Access
Source
Zenodo (record 13139672)

License note: Non-commercial + No-derivatives: do not republish derivatives, link to the original

Your edits to the notebook only affect your own copy in the Hub. Changed it and want the original back? Restore it here.

Challenge

Which invasive taxa in GIATAR have spread to the most countries, and how has the global rate of new invasions changed over the last two centuries?

Where to start
Open GIATAR - Data and query code.zip and read dataset/occurrences/first_records.csv directly from the archive (usecols usageKey, ISO3, year, Source, Type). Clean year: drop nulls, cast to int, keep 1500-2025. Group by year for an accumulation curve, count distinct usageKey per ISO3 for hotspots, and for one taxon (e.g. usageKey 3084719, Portulaca oleracea) sort first-record years and take a cumulative count of countries. Join dataset/species lists/invasive_all_source.csv (usageKey to canonicalName, kingdom) for names and taxonomy. License is No-Derivatives: analyse freely but link back to the original, do not republish a derived dataset.
What to share
A spread-over-time figure - a global accumulation curve of first records by decade and/or a cumulative-countries spread curve for your chosen taxon - plus a short note on the invasion hotspots and dominant kingdom, shared with a link to the source Zenodo record.

💬 Discuss this dataset, ask questions and share your results in its discussion thread. Challenges are open-ended — there's no single right answer.