Deriving inventories of non-native plant species from iNaturalist: Insights from urban centres of the Western Cape, South Africa

Accurate, up-to-date inventories of non-native species are important to document and improve our understanding of biological invasions globally and inform management decisions. Traditional methods for the collation of inventories are time- and resource intensive, and lists become outdated if not regularly updated. The community science platform, iNaturalist, can contribute to the collation of regularly updatable (“living”) inventories of non-native species. However, robust and transparent workflows are needed to optimise data quality to take full advantage of iNaturalist. We present a semi-automated workflow for the collation and completeness assessment of non-native vascular plant inventories from iNaturalist. The workflow is informed by the World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) to compare native ranges to a reference area. The utility of the workflow is demonstrated by compiling non-native species inventories of 100 urban centres in the Western Cape province, South Africa. A total of 947 taxa of wild-growing, i.e. casual, naturalised and invasive plants were observed in these urban centres which showed varying levels of sample completeness. Most small towns had too few records for a completeness assessment. Larger urban centres and those near the coast were typically better sampled. This work highlights the potential for iNaturalist to construct non-native species inventories given sufficient coverage and thorough curation.