Weeds on Western Australia's Islands: A historical database with records spanning from 1913 to 2014

The island weeds database contains weed records for 697 islands and 1995 plant species. Data sources cited span between 1913 and 2014. To compound the value of the database, original species identifications were verified by Parks and Wildlife botanists and species names were updated to current taxonomy using the WA census data housed within MAX Version 3.0 (Woodman and Gioia 2016). We do not present any interpretation of the data with this data submission. GPS coordinates for weeds were largely unavailable, so most coordinates provided within the database are island centroids. Woodman, S. & Gioia, P. (2016) Max Version 3. Department of Parks and Wildlife, Perth. Available from: http://www.dpaw.wa.gov.au/max.

Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
The authors acknowledge the contributions of many original data collectors and the expertise and help of the Western Australia Department of Parks and Wildlife Plant Science Program and Herbarium and Australian National Botanic Gardens.

Purpose
Alien plants pose a substantial threat to island ecosystems in Australia and worldwide. A better understanding of weed distributions is necessary to more effectively manage natural resources on islands. To address this need for Western Australian islands, the author created a database of all available records of alien plants on these islands. The broad goal of this project is to prioritize island management actions such that we maximize the number of achievable conservation outcomes for island biodiversity in the face of threats from invasive species. Western Australia has over 3,700 islands, many of which are essential for the survival of threatened species and provide critical breeding sites for seabirds and sea turtles. In some cases, islands support the last remaining populations of plant and animal species making their long term protection highly desirable. Many of Western Australia's islands are also popular sites for recreation, and tourism, and contain many culturally significant sites. Invasive species are the single biggest cause of loss of native species from islands across the globe. The increased use of islands by the public for recreation, and oil, gas and mining industries means an increased likelihood that invasive species will colonize pristine islands. This project will develop a decision support tool for day-to-day use in making accountable and cost-effective decisions about where to spend limited funding on management of islands to promote the persistence of native species. The decision support tool, which will be developed in collaboration with researchers from James Cook University, Queensland, will assist in prioritizing WA islands for conservation surveillance and management. The project will initially focus on the islands along the Pilbara coast between Exmouth Gulf and Eighty Mile Beach.