The success of European plant species as aliens worldwide is thought to reflect their association with human-disturbed environments. However, an explicit test including all human-made, seminatural and natural habitat types of Europe, and their contributions as donor habitats of naturalized species to the rest of the globe, has been missing. Here we combine two databases, the European Vegetation Checklist and the Global Naturalized Alien Flora, to assess how human influence in European habitats affects the probability of naturalization of their plant species on other continents. A total of 9,875 native European vascular plant species were assigned to 39 European habitat types; of these, 2,550 species have become naturalized somewhere in the world. Species that occur in both human-made habitats and seminatural or natural habitats in Europe have the highest probability of naturalization (64.7% and 64.5% of them have naturalized). Species associated only with human-made or seminatural habitats still have a significantly higher probability of becoming naturalized (41.7% and 28.6%, respectively) than species confined to natural habitats (19.4%). Species associated with arable land and human settlements were recorded as naturalized in the largest number of regions worldwide. Our findings highlight that plant species' association with native-range habitats disturbed by human activities, combined with broad habitat range, play an important role in shaping global patterns of plant invasions.

Biodiversity Macroecology and Conservation Biogeography Group Faculty of Forest Sciences and Forest Ecology University of Göttingen 37077 Göttingen Germany

Centre for Invasion Biology Department of Botany and Zoology Stellenbosch University Matieland 7602 South Africa

Department of Biosciences Durham University Durham DH1 3LE United Kingdom

Department of Botany and Zoology Masaryk University 611 37 Brno Czech Republic

Department of Botany and Zoology Masaryk University 611 37 Brno Czech Republic;

Department of Ecology Faculty of Science Charles University 128 43 Praha 2 Czech Republic

Department of Geography and Environmental Studies Stellenbosch University Matieland 7602 Stellenbosch South Africa

Department of Invasion Ecology Institute of Botany The Czech Academy of Sciences 252 43 Průhonice Czech Republic

Division of Conservation Biology Vegetation and Landscape Ecology University of Vienna 1030 Vienna Austria

Ecology Lab Department of Biology University of Konstanz 78464 Konstanz Germany

Iluka Chair in Vegetation Science and Biogeography School of Biological Sciences The University of Western Australia Crawley WA 6009 Perth Australia

Synthesis Centre Halle Jena Leipzig 04103 Leipzig Germany

Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Plant Evolutionary Ecology and Conservation Taizhou University Taizhou 318000 China

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