About

Why we created ILORA

The idea for creating the Indian aLien flOra infoRmAtion (ILORA) database started to develop in mid-2019 when some of us were working in a project on ornamental plant invasion in India. We soon realized that a vast quantity of information on alien plant species is being available on a regular basis in several databases, often in a global scenario. We started to knock at each of these repositories to get information for our working subset of species and discovered that the information across multiple databases was contradictory to some extent (e.g. alien status of a species) and more importantly, these repositories often missed the country scale information (e.g. data available only for a subset of species). At this point of time, we enlarged the scope from ornamental aliens to all alien species of India, standardized the species taxonomy, and accumulated information for each of these species from all kinds of available resources. After one year of intensive search operations and communications with the scientists and academicians of the country, ILORA version 1 was born on September 2020.

ILORA is focused, easy to use and credible

It was never our intention to prepare ‘the’ list of the alien flora of India, rather ILORA was made to curate information on all Indian alien flora reported till date keeping in mind the necessity of a broad spectrum of stakeholders engaged in research and/or policy directives, especially on invasive alien plant species. ILORA is therefore designed to provide information following the introduction to the invasion continuum and currently contains the following traits: alien status, general biology, introduction history, socio-economic information, climatic requirement, and current distribution in India.

Having the primary objective of data accessibility, ILORA is made user friendly. The data files have been provided in simple text format which can be put to various uses, like preliminary visualization to detailed analyses.

We know that accuracy builds credibility; therefore, utmost care is taken to ensure the precision of every individual component of ILORA - be it a species name or any variable - data have been checked twice (sometimes, thrice) before feeding to ILORA.

All data files are available to download HERE; the only thing we ask for is acknowledgment.

ILORA is dynamic and open to contribution

ILORA is dynamic in every possible way, especially as we are well aware of the continuously changing landscape of the biological invasion research. Our near-future efforts to enrich ILORA include, but will not be limited to, resolving alien status, curating phenological trait information, finding phylogenetic relatedness, and predicting distribution in current and future climate conditions.

While making ILORA, we felt the overwhelming presence of missing data in the Indian context. India is a country with high diversity in every aspect – be it any life form or research activities on them. It will be by no means possible for us to capture the vast and rich amount of data stored in several pockets of the country, e.g. in local herbaria, journals, and periodicals in vernacular languages, thesis reports documenting rare locations of alien plant species. Therefore, we now call for experts to check the data and contribute new data. For any potential mistake, submission of new data for the existing variables, and a proposal for novel variables to be included in ILORA, please check HERE.