Keywords: open science

The idea for the Global Naturalized Alien Flora (GloNAF) started to develop in November 2011, after some researchers realized that scholars still had to use incomplete data on global alien species richness. Initially, it aimed at bringing together data on the number of naturalized alien vascular plant species in different parts of the world. Soon the aim was upgraded to bringing together inventories with the identities of the naturalized alien vascular plant species. For three years (without any funding), the core GloNAF members, searched the internet for naturalized plant inventories, contacted taxonomists and invasion biologists for such inventories, digitized these species lists, and standardized the taxonomic names. In 2015, GloNAF version 1.1 was born. In 2015, the project also got funded for a 3-year period by the German Science Foundation DFG and the Austrian Science Foundation FWF. This will allow us to update and expand GloNAF, and most importantly to further analyze the data.

GloNAF (Global Naturalized Alien Flora) is a living database project about naturalized alien plant species. The database is available for public access. The database team encourages experts to check the data included in GloNAF to identify potential mistakes. Additionally, they encourage people to contribute new data that extend existing regional species lists or close current gaps.