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Glossary

Last updated: 12 Aug 2026

Basis of record

The method used to generate the weed record. For example, a human observation in the field, a preserved herbarium specimen, or a material sample.

SWAT stores this information from the publisher's record and shows it as a readable label for each weed record. Where a record is known to come from DNA evidence, SWAT adds "(Derived from DNA)". This shows that the detection was based on DNA analysis rather than a direct visual observation. Some DNA-derived records may not be labelled this way because GBIF is still improving how it reports DNA-based records.

Buffer distance

A buffer distance adds a margin around each place you select. Your alert then includes weed records found within that margin, not just inside the place boundary.

How wide should your buffer be?

Choose a width that matches what you want to know:

  • 50 m – covers small gaps along an inexact place boundary.
  • 500 m – includes most weed records reported just offshore (about 1% of vascular plants).
  • Larger buffers (for example 1–5 km) – alert you to weeds outside your place that may be spreading towards it. Use this when you want early warning of nearby incursions, not only weeds already inside the boundary.

A wider buffer means more weed records in your alerts, including weeds that are not yet in your place.

Catalogue of Life

Abbreviation: COL, COL-XR

Plant taxonomy is the system scientists use to organise and name plants. It groups plants by shared characteristics (and increasingly DNA) into levels such as species, genus and family. This lets people reliably identify and talk about the same plant.

The Catalogue of Life is a global collaboration that compiles the world's known species into a single, consistent checklist. COL-XR (Catalogue of Life eXtended Release) is an expanded version of this checklist. It brings together names from many scientific sources into one agreed structure. It also fills gaps to cover more of the world's species. COL-XR is updated monthly.

GBIF has now moved from the GBIF Backbone Taxonomy to COL-XR as its primary taxonomy. 

Category of weed

A category of weed is a group of plant species that share a recognised status in New Zealand. That status may be management, regulatory, or ecological. 

In SWAT, the 'Category of weed' alert type lets you get alerts for species belonging in these categories:

Currently classified as a weed

A species is currently classified as a weed if it is officially recognised as a weed or pest under one of the weed categories, or is included on the Weedbusters website. Subtaxa of these species are also classified as weeds.

SWAT weed alerts show 'Currently classified as a weed' for each species. This is also shown on each Species page.

Event date

The date when the weed was observed or collected in the field. This is not the date the record was published to GBIF or added to SWAT.

SWAT stores the event date from the publisher's record. The date may be a full date (for example, 25 March 2024), a month and year, or a year only. When only a month and year are given, SWAT uses the first of the month. When only the year is given, SWAT uses 1 January as a placeholder, so the date can be stored and shown consistently. Records without an event date are not included in SWAT.

The alert setting for limiting by age of records uses the event date to work out whether a record falls within the selected time period.

GBIF

The Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) is an international network and data infrastructure funded by the world's governments. It aims to give anyone, anywhere, open access to data about all types of life on Earth.

Organisations publish data to GBIF, including some regional councils, government departments, herbaria, iNaturalist and other platforms.

As at July 2026, GBIF contained about 1 million exotic plant records for New Zealand from 150 publishers.

GBIF Backbone Taxonomy

See also Catalogue of Life for a short explanation of plant taxonomy.

The legacy GBIF Backbone Taxonomy is now officially retired. It was last updated in August 2023 and will receive no further updates. GBIF has replaced it with the Catalogue of Life eXtended Release (COL-XR).

Herbarium

(Plural: herbaria)

Museums and research collections that store preserved plant specimens and the information recorded with each one.

Herbarium records are a major source of historical weed sightings. This includes observations made many years before they were digitised and published.

iNaturalist

iNaturalist is a free platform for anyone to record their observations of nature. Once iNaturalist records become Research Grade and pass the other Data Quality Assessments, they are synchronised to GBIF and used by SWAT.

Iwi area of interest

An iwi area of interest is a geographic region where a specific iwi (Māori tribe) or hapū (sub-tribe) has traditional ancestral ties, historical claims, or kaitiakitanga (resource management responsibilities). These boundaries often overlap because multiple groups share historical connections to the same land and waterways.

Location uncertainty

The location of each weed record is often uncertain. This can happen when a GPS device is not exact, when the location is estimated by hand, or when it is deliberately obscured.

Each weed record has a location uncertainty value. With the map coordinates, this value describes the smallest circle that contains the weed. The value may be empty when the uncertainty is unknown or cannot be estimated.

Maximum location uncertainty

When you set up a new alert, you can set the 'Maximum location uncertainty' under 'Advanced settings'. SWAT excludes weed records with a location uncertainty greater than the distance you choose. Records with an empty uncertainty value are always kept.

By default, this value is 25 m, so your alert only includes records that are easy to find. Increasing it lets you receive alerts for new weed records even when the plants are hard to find on the ground. This supports broader awareness of the species present in New Zealand, without the need to locate individual plants. To include iNaturalist observations with obscured locations, set the value to 30 km or higher. About 0.1% of weed records in SWAT have a location uncertainty greater than 30 km.

iNaturalist obscured observations

iNaturalist observations may be obscured by the observer, or obscured automatically for sensitive species. An obscured observation is placed randomly within a 0.2° × 0.2° area. In New Zealand, this equals a location uncertainty of about 28 km. If an observation is of great interest, the observer may be able to tell you the exact location. Send them a direct message to ask.

Getting accurate locations when recording weeds

If you're recording an iNaturalist observation, make sure it has a reasonable location uncertainty value. This is shown as the 'Acc.' value under the location. To improve it, wait a few seconds for your phone's GPS to synchronise before you take the photo. You can also set the location by hand and update the Acc. value.

Management programme

(Also known as an objective)

Weeds are managed under one or more management programmes within each RPMP. These programmes are set out in the National Policy Direction for Pest Management:

  • Exclusion: aims to prevent pests that are not yet present in the region from establishing.
  • Eradication: aims to completely remove the pest from the region over time.
  • Progressive Containment: aims to contain or reduce the area over which the pest is spread.
  • Sustained Control: ongoing control to reduce the pest's impact and limit its spread to other properties.
  • Site-led (also called protecting values in place): targets the pest in specific areas to protect the values of those places.
  • Organisms of Interest (also called Advisory species): species that do not yet have official pest status but pose enough risk to warrant ongoing surveillance or future control.

Note that inclusion on an RPMP does not necessarily mean a council manages that species across the whole region. 

Search by Category of weed to find details of each management programme.

New records

The count of new records of each taxon (including all its subtaxa and any related taxa) present in an alert. This only includes the weed records that match all the settings in the alert, such as location, buffer zone and advanced settings.

Notifiable organisms

In New Zealand, a notifiable organism is one that must be reported to the Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) if detected or suspected. This is because of its potential to cause serious harm to the environment, economy or human health. A Chief Technical Officer classifies these as notifiable under the Biosecurity Act 1993, based on their risk and the need for rapid response. Many are exotic or under active eradication. Mandatory reporting helps prevent their spread. Anyone who finds or suspects one must contact MPI, usually through the exotic pest and disease hotline 0800 80 99 66.

To list plants that are notifiable organisms, go to Pests of concern to NZ | ONZPR | MPI | NZ Govt. Select ‘plant’ as organism type and ‘yes’ for Notifiable.

New Zealand Plant Conservation Network (NZPCN)

The New Zealand Plant Conservation Network (NZPCN) is a national non-profit organisation. It promotes the conservation of New Zealand's plant life and runs an online plant information resource.

The NZPCN website covers native and introduced (exotic) plants. It includes descriptions, identification features, distribution data, conservation status and references.

Publisher

An organisation that shares occurrence records with GBIF. Publishers include herbaria, regional and local councils, government agencies, contractors, community groups, and citizen-science platforms such as iNaturalist. Each publisher maintains its own dataset. SWAT alerts you when a publisher adds records that match your alert settings.

Regional Pest Management Plan (RPMP)

A Regional Pest Management Plan (RPMP) is a formal, legally binding document developed by a regional council or unitary authority under the Biosecurity Act 1993. It sets out how specific pest species – plants, animals or pathogens – will be managed within that region. The aim is to protect environmental, economic, social or cultural values. 

Pest species in each RPMP are managed under one or more management programmes.

Note that inclusion of a species on a RPMP does not necessarily mean the species is managed across the whole region.

Search by Management Plan to find details of each RPMP. 

Related taxa

Two or more distinct entries in the GBIF taxonomy that share the same scientific name but have different authorships. Records are grouped by scientific name. For example, records of both Acanthus mollis L. and Acanthus mollis Graf & Noë ex Nees are treated together as Acanthus mollis across the species page, alerts and record counts.

Species

In SWAT, the term 'Species' is often used to refer to taxa in general, for example on the Species page and when selecting particular weed species for alerts.

The Species list in SWAT combines taxa from several sources:

SWAT only includes taxa from the Plantae kingdom, plus Undaria pinnatifida, Lindavia intermedia and Didymosphenia geminata from the Chromista kingdom.

Native taxa are excluded from SWAT.

A new species is added whenever a GBIF occurrence appears in New Zealand of a species that is not currently on the species list. These go through a review to check whether they have been misidentified or are in a cultivated setting, such as someone's garden. If so, they are excluded.

Subtaxon

(Plural: subtaxa)

A subtaxon is a taxonomic group of a rank lower than another specified taxon. It typically refers to subordinate ranks such as subspecies, variety or form.

SWAT

The Smart Weed Alert Tool (SWAT), developed by the Department of Conservation (DOC), helps protect New Zealand's ecosystems with timely, accurate alerts about invasive weeds. 

Read more about SWAT.

Synonym

A scientific name that has been used for the same plant species but is not the currently accepted name. Taxonomies such as the Catalogue of Life group these names together, with one accepted name and the others treated as synonyms. The accepted name can vary between global and local systems. So a species may be known by one name in GBIF and a different accepted name in New Zealand.

Taxon

(Plural: taxa)

A taxonomic group of any rank, such as a species, family or class. Note that SWAT often uses the term species to refer to taxa in general, rather than only species-ranked taxa.

Taxonomic rank

The level of a taxon in the system scientists use to name and group living things. Broader levels include kingdom, family and genus. Finer levels include species, subspecies, variety and form.

SWAT shows the rank next to each name on the Species list, for example Species or Genus. Ranks come from the Catalogue of Life, which GBIF uses. A subtaxon is a taxon at a finer level than another taxon you choose.

Total records

The count of all weed records of each taxon (including all its subtaxa and any related taxa) present in an alert, within the locations specified for the alert. Advanced settings are ignored, so the count includes all weed records over all time, with no location uncertainty limit.

Unwanted organisms

In New Zealand, an unwanted organism is any species officially designated under the Biosecurity Act 1993 as potentially harmful to the environment, human health or natural resources. The Ministry for Primary Industries (MPI) makes this designation and lists the organism in the Unwanted Organisms Register. Once a species is declared unwanted, it becomes illegal to sell, propagate or distribute it without permission. These organisms are often targeted for control, containment or eradication through national or regional pest management programmes.

To see plants that are unwanted organisms, go to Pests of concern to NZ | ONZPR | MPI | NZ Govt. Select ‘plant’ as the organism type and ‘yes’ for Unwanted.

Weed

A weed is a plant growing somewhere it is not wanted. Whether a plant is a weed depends on context. The same species may be welcome in one place and unwanted in another. Many weeds grow fast, adapt easily and spread quickly once they establish. They compete with other plants, alter ecosystems and cause environmental, economic or social harm. Read more

Weedbusters

Weedbusters is a national organisation with online resources to help you identify and control weeds.

Find your local Weedbusters group. If you are already part of a group, add it to the Weedbusters map.

Weed categories

SWAT includes weed categories relating to a number of national or regional pest frameworks:

  • Regional Pest Management Plans (RPMPs) for each region in New Zealand. These are broken down into management programmes that define how each weed on the RPMP is managed.
  • List of environmental weeds in New Zealand 2024
  • Unwanted organisms
  • Notifiable organisms
  • National Pest Plant Accord
  • National Interest Pest Response

Weed records

A record of a weed (or exotic species) in the SWAT system. It is a single observation of a species at a specific location and time. Each record contains taxonomic information, geographic coordinates, an observation date, and metadata about the source and quality of the observation.

Weed records are copies of GBIF occurrence records that:

  • are in the Plantae kingdom (or are Undaria pinnatifida, Lindavia intermedia or Didymosphenia geminata from the Chromista kingdom)
  • have country = 'NZ'
  • have occurrence status = 'PRESENT'
  • have a valid Year (greater than 0)
  • have valid coordinates (not 0, not out of range, and coordinates match the country)

SWAT retrieves weed records from GBIF daily.

Note that weed records may be updated after you have been alerted. This may change the taxon, location or any other attribute.

Weed records may also be deleted after you have been alerted. These are highlighted as deleted records in SWAT.

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