Historical plant sales (HPS) database: Documenting the spatiotemporal history of plant sales in the conterminous U.S.
Dates
Publication Date
2023-05-03
Start Date
1719
End Date
1978
Citation
Matthew E. Fertakos, Evelyn M. Beaury, Neil R. Ford, Nicole L. Kinlock, Denise W. Adams, and Bethany A. Bradley, 2023, Historical plant sales (HPS) database: Documenting the spatiotemporal history of plant sales in the conterminous U.S., Dataset: https://doi.org/10.7275/0t5v-5r18.
Summary
We downloaded, cleaned, and combined records from Biodiversity Heritage Library’s (BHL) Seed and Nursery Catalog Collection with data from Restoring American Gardens: An encyclopedia of heirloom ornamental plants, 1640-1940 (RAG; Adams 2004) to create a single database of historical nursery sales in the U.S. Each record represents an individual taxon offered for sale at an individual time in a specific nursery’s catalog. We standardized records to the current World Flora Online (http://worldfloraonline.org) accepted taxonomy, and appended accepted USDA code, growth habit, and introduction status. We also appended whether taxa were reported as invasive in the Global Plant Invaders (GPI) dataset or the Global Invasive Species Database [...]
Summary
We downloaded, cleaned, and combined records from Biodiversity Heritage Library’s (BHL) Seed and Nursery Catalog Collection with data from Restoring American Gardens: An encyclopedia of heirloom ornamental plants, 1640-1940 (RAG; Adams 2004) to create a single database of historical nursery sales in the U.S. Each record represents an individual taxon offered for sale at an individual time in a specific nursery’s catalog. We standardized records to the current World Flora Online (http://worldfloraonline.org) accepted taxonomy, and appended accepted USDA code, growth habit, and introduction status. We also appended whether taxa were reported as invasive in the Global Plant Invaders (GPI) dataset or the Global Invasive Species Database (GISD), or regulated in the conterminous U.S. Lastly, we geocoded all reported publication locations. The dataset contains 2,445,875 records from nurseries in at least 2,795 unique locations, with the majority of catalogs published between 1890-1950. Nurseries were located in all conterminous states but were concentrated in the eastern U.S. and California. We identified 19,140 unique horticultural taxa, of which 8,642 matched taxa in the USDA Plants database. The USDA Plants database is limited to native and naturalized taxa in the US. Native or introduced status was listed in USDA Plants for 7,018 of included taxa, while 1,642 had an unknown status. The remaining 10,498 taxa are not naturalized according to USDA Plants or are of varieties of native and introduced taxa that did not match to USDA Plants taxonomy. The majority of taxa in the Historical Plant Sales (HPS) database with an identified status are native (65.5%; 4,596 of 7,018 taxa), of which 393 taxa are reported as invasive outside of the U.S. Of the 2381 introduced taxa, 1,103 (46.3%) are reported as invasive somewhere globally. Despite a richer pool of native taxa, most cataloged plant records with an identified status were of introduced taxa (54.1%; 1,045,684 of 1,933,925 records). Plants reported as invasive somewhere globally comprised a large portion of records with an identified status (38.7%; 747,953 of 1,933,925 records) underscoring the large role of ornamental introductions in facilitating plant invasions.
Historical horticultural plant sales influence native and non-native species assemblages in contemporary ecosystems. Over half of non-native, invasive plants naturalized in the United States were introduced as ornamentals, and the spatial and temporal patterns of early introduction undoubtedly influence current invasion ecology. While thousands of digitized nursery catalogs documenting these introductions are publicly available, they have not been standardized in a single database. The HPS database provides a consolidated and standardized perspective on the history of native, introduced, and invasive plant sales in the U.S.
