Integrating citizen science and state agency data expands environmental coverage of occurrence data in invasive species distribution models

Integrating citizen science and state agency records improves environmental coverage for SDMs of three invasive plants in central Germany, yielding slightly higher mean AUC (0.85 ± 0.07).

• Why it matters: SDM risk assessments for invasive plants are limited by incomplete occurrence coverage, and citizen science and agency monitoring sample different habitats that are rarely combined.
• What they did: The study compared CS, state agency, and combined datasets for Ailanthus altissima, Heracleum mantegazzianum, and Impatiens glandulifera using PCA and Schoener’s D, then fit hierarchical SDMs with boosted regression trees.
• The result: Combined models showed slightly higher mean AUC (0.85 ± 0.07) and TSS (0.58 ± 0.15), while discrimination was not significantly different; applicability (>59%) stayed high, and integration broadened environmental representation despite persistent sampling biases.

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