Collecting and Sharing (data on) Invasive Aquatic Species

The US Geological Survey’s Nonindigenious Aquatic Species (NAS) program has monitored, recorded, and analysed occurrences of alien freshwater organisms in the United States since the 1980s.

GBIF-mediated data resources used : 12,000 occurrences
Wrinkled Frog (Glandirana rugosa) native to Japan, Korea, northeastern China and parts of the Russian Far East, reported in Hawaii as early as 1896. Photo by colinmorita via iNaturalist licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

Wrinkled Frog (Glandirana rugosa) native to Japan, Korea, northeastern China and parts of the Russian Far East, reported in Hawaii as early as 1896. Photo by colinmorita via iNaturalist licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

The US Geological Survey’s Nonindigenious Aquatic Species (NAS) program has monitored, recorded, and analysed occurrences of alien freshwater organisms in the United States since the 1980s. The records draw from a number of sources, including 12,000 records from the GBIF network, all maintained in a publicly accessible online database where users can search, display and map species by state, temporal range or other variables. The database has been used in a number of different studies, and distribution maps have appeared in many publications and news outlets. USGS also publishes the 260,000 records of the NAS database as a dataset on GBIF.org.

The U.S. Geological Survey's Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database: over thirty years of tracking introduced aquatic species...

  • Fuller, P., Neilson, M. E. (2015). The U.S. Geological Survey’s Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database: over thirty years of tracking introduced aquatic species in the United States (and counting). Management of Biological Invasions, 6(2), 159–170. doi:10.3391/mbi.2015.6.2.06
  • Robert S. Powell. 2016. Glandirana rugosa. USGS Nonindigenous Aquatic Species Database, Gainesville, FL. Revision Date: 8/17/2015 (link)