Persistent soil seed banks promote naturalisation and invasiveness in flowering plants

With globalisation facilitating the movement of plants and seeds beyond native range, preventing potentially harmful introductions requires knowledge what drives successful establishment spread alien plants. Here, we examined global-scale relationships between naturalisation success (incidence extent) invasiveness, soil seed bank properties (type densities) key species traits (seed mass, dormancy life form) for 2350 angiosperms. Naturalisation invasiveness were strongly associated with ability to form persistent (vs. transient) banks but relatively weakly densities other traits. Our findings suggest that persistence is a trait better captures become naturalised invasive compared more widely available in databases. Knowledge can contribute our predict global identify flowering before they are introduced.