Aim: Niche dynamics of invasive alien plants (IAPs) play pivotal roles in biological invasion. Ageratina adenophora—one of the most aggressive IAPs in China and some parts of the world—poses severe ecological and socioeconomic threats. However, the spatiotemporal niche dynamics of A. adenophora in China remain unknown, which we aimed to elucidate in the present study.

Location: China, Mexico

Methods: Using a unifying framework, we reconstructed the climate niche dynamics of. adenophora and applied the optimal MaxEnt model to predict its potential geographical distribution in China. Furthermore, we compared the heterogeneity of A. adenophora niche between Mexico (native) and China (invasive).

Results: We observed a low niche overlap between Mexico (native) and China (invasive). Specifically, the niche of A. adenophora in China has distinctly expanded compared with that in Mexico, enhancing the invasion risk of this IAP in the former country. In fact, the climatic niche of A. adenophora in Mexico is a subset of that in China. The potential geographical distribution of A. adenophorais concentrated in the tropical and subtropical zones of Southwest China, and its geographical distribution pattern in China is shaped by the combination of precipitation and temperature variables.

Main conclusions: The niche dynamics of A. adenophora follow the hypothesis of niche shift and conservatism. The present work provides a unifying framework for studies on the niche dynamics of other IAPs worldwide.

Occurrence data of A. adenophora in the native (Mexico) and invasive (China) countries were collected and interpreted. First, we searched the occurrence data of A. adenophora from online databases, including the Southwest Environmental Information Network (SEINet, http://swbiodiversity.org), Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, http://www.gbif.org/), and Chinese Virtual Herbarium (CVH, http://www.cvh.ac.cn) and our field survey data. Further, we obtained detailed occurrence data of A. adenophora in China through field surveys. Next, we saved occurrence data with detailed geographic information and used ENMTools to assign the occurrence data of A. adenophora such that only one occurrence point was retained in per grid (5 km × 5 km) to minimize the bias or error (regarding the resolution of environmental variables) . Finally, 224 occurrence points in Mexico and 2,481 occurrence points in China were obtained.